I sat in my car for an hour and half last night and begged God to give me a clearer sign. A lightning bolt, a dream, a thumbs-up in the clouds, just tell me if I'm doing it right this time because I'm fucking suffering. They said it won't happen overnight, that I'd have to kick for the surface a while but Jesus, I can't tell which way is up or down.
He's rearranged the furniture so that I don't recognize the place anymore. I wake up in the middle of the night and don't know where I am. I hold my breath so God can talk to me. A sensation of pins and needles waves over my shoulders and wraps around my neck and I am paralyzed. I cry out, but I have no voice. I panic and try to sit up but my body is weighed down, smothered by this force, and all I can do is tap frantically on his chest to wake him up wake up wake up. His body sleeps so heavy and so solid, tethered to my ankles, Let go.
My mother used to cry out in her sleep for Jesus, she said her nightmares were demons trying to pry into her subconscious but the name of Him alone would save her and send those demons cowering back to Hell. Still they kept coming back, causing her body to writhe and her moans to frighten my father into sleeping on the couch for the rest of her life. He learned to sleep through these nights, but her screams would wake my sister and I from clear across the house and send us racing to her bedroom to shake her awake, Don't let the Devil get my mother. We would peel back her eyelids and she looked straight through us, as if she had forgotten who her daughters were. Gasping and coming to her senses she'd hold us close and say, My babies, my babies, God bless my babies.
I cry and I gasp and I kick, Lord, Don't let the Devil get my baby. I'm kicking.
You were such a liar. Before I knew any better, you told me I was born in the ocean like a mermaid. You told everyone I could swim before I could walk, and I believed you. Then I grew up and you died and I told myself I was never coming back to California. I’m not saying it’s the West Coast that kills people, because it’s probably just a nice place to die. And I’m not saying I’m the expert in dying either, because to be honest with you, it still feels new to me.
"How long does this take?" I asked the driver.
"Depends. At first you start feeling cold."
Yeah, okay. It was less than thirty degrees outside, the coldest I ever remember it being here, or anywhere for that matter. It didn't help that my car's leather upholstery was frozen solid. I remembered how hot it was the summer I turned fifteen and you were teaching me how to drive stick-shift in this car. I was pissed because it was so hot I was sweating and had to peel my thighs off these seats. You laughed and said maybe if my shorts weren’t so doggone short. I didn’t speak to you the rest of that day. Now tonight, even under layers of thermals, sweaters and coat we were trying not to shiver. I blew into my gloved hands and pressed my palms over my ears.
"I'm a little cold."
"Then it shouldn't be much longer."
I wasn't used to being passenger in my own car. I flipped down the visor mirror to check my eyes to see if they had changed like his were changing. The three of us decided it would be a good idea to attend your services under the influence of any and every illicit substance we could get our hands on, most of which I had never even heard of. We weren't trying to feel good anymore; at this point we were just trying to feel. The three of us knew we should have been feeling so many things after seeing you tonight.
A warm glow from the automatic vanity light filled the interior. The girl in the back made an annoyed sound as she tried to inconspicuously sink herself lower into the seat. As if it mattered that we might be visible to passers-by or fellow drivers. If anyone else was out at 3 a.m., I'm sure they had their own problems. The time of night and the extreme temperature left the downtown streets pretty sparse of pedestrians, but I took comfort in the fact that there were at least a few cars next to us and behind us at a red light.
It was like after Mom left, you’d leave the T.V. on all night so the house wouldn’t feel so empty. I remember walking home from my first day of second grade and seeing her friends’ and relatives’ cars lined up down the block in front of the house. Inside they were emptying cabinets and dumping drawers and closets into cardboard boxes and garbage bags, loading all of it into those trucks and minivans. I found you in the backyard smoking a cigarette and I asked you where she was going. You said you didn’t know, but that she’d be back. I believed you. We went to Hamburger Stand and by the time we came back, they were all gone and we watched Jeopardy reruns in that empty house until we both fell asleep. We never saw her again and we never turned off that television. For the same reason she left, for the same reason I couldn’t drive alone to your funeral, for the same reason I needed there to be other cars on the road with us tonight.
You said that humans were funny like that. That we sometimes needed other people to justify our existence, or we looked for things to remind us of what it meant to be alive, and I know I should be feeling so many things after seeing you tonight, but I just feel cold. Did you feel cold at all?
When I was little I asked you what it might be like and you said it felt just like going to sleep. This frightened me at nine years old, and I couldn’t sleep at night because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between sleeping and dying. I asked you how you would know and you said that you’d see something so perfect, and everyone knows that when you see something that perfect, it should be the last thing you ever see. I said I think that should feel an awful lot like being alive, and you said you didn't think there was much of an in-between. It didn't make sense, but I believed you anyway.
Out the window the ocean was as dark as the sky, except the city lights reflected off the clouds making them an eerie orange. I hated nights like these, they looked like something out of a bad dream. It reminded me of when you used to take me flying at night sometimes. From up there, the ocean was infinite and black and it scared me to tears. The sky looked like it was on fire and the world was going to end. To ease my fear, you would tell me, "Look down at San Diego, all those lights. The cars look like little lightning bugs." It didn't matter that I knew very well that lightning bugs looked like overgrown glow-in-the-dark houseflies, because I saw the tiny moving lights of cars wind around the buildings and corners, over the bridge, and I believed you. We could have been in a downward tailspin towards our doom and I would have still believed you.
"Have you ever seen a lightning bug?" I asked the driver.
"A what? No."
No one calls them lightning bugs anyway, they're fireflies and they don't even exist here in California. That's another reason why I'm leaving.
The girl in the back said nothing the entire drive. She kept her expressionless gaze fixed out on the black Pacific, forehead pressed against the window, her breath making little clouds of moisture on the glass with every exhale. The driver cleared his throat. I thought about going to sleep, but felt obligated to stay awake since I wouldn’t be seeing San Diego ever ever ever again.
You had called earlier this week like you always do and said you had a cold; you talked about the weather and the new patio. You joked about hoping the harbor would freeze over so we could go ice-fishing when I came down for my nineteenth birthday in two weeks. Then another phone call and it was pneumonia and by the time I made it to California you had fallen asleep and they said you went to see Jesus in the arms of angels and it all sounded so nice. You were alive, and then you weren’t. You didn't get a chance to tell me if you saw something perfect, or if there was an in-between.
But you probably weren’t there that long anyway. You weren’t driving through it at three in the morning without a concept of time or place; it probably didn’t feel like swallowing shards of glass and it probably didn’t taste like cigarettes and gasoline. You weren’t desperate for something to remind you of what it meant to exist. You weren’t cold like we were.
Cold from the inside out. When you take in your surroundings, not because you feel you have to, but because you feel like you are already on the other side of this bridge, watching this moment from a far away place like a memory. When your senses have never felt so heightened, alert, so keen, but you don't notice. When you notice things you never noticed before. You study the tiny dots of precipitation forming on the windshield. Then the rest is farther away, you focus on the patterns of breathing in the car and how they all seem synchronized to the hum of the engine, the waves in the harbor, and the swell of the music that fills the night with such a crescendo like the epic underscore of a film’s closing credits.
All these things you will take with you. The sky is on fire, the city pulses with such life and color you are absolutely convinced that this is the end of the world and that it is the most perfect fucking thing you have ever seen.
So you wonder what it must look like from up there. Maybe in a seperate dimension in space and time you are watching it from an airplane and he is saying to you, "That car looks like a little lightning bug moving in the night."
But you are already asleep.
Then Go Lightly on the Ground
The siren’s shrill, inconsistent series of screeches pierces through the night; a cryptic Morse code: I love you, I love. I, you. Even in this faraway place between awake and not awake, I still am so conditioned to playing these games. I hear voices, doors opening and shutting, and footsteps of residents as they groggily wrap bathrobes around themselves and evacuate their apartments, stepping over and paying no mind to the sleeping girl on the concrete steps. These sounds echo and reverberate through the grimy, dilapidated second floor corridor of my apartment building, penetrating a very, very deep vodka-induced sleep to reach my deepest subconscious. My head pounds as I force open my eyes. Squinting, I watch my neighbors file down the steps in slow motion behind the frantic strobe light of the fire alarm and I, clutching the dingy stucco wall for support, stand to dazedly follow the procession.
If I hadn’t locked myself out of my apartment, I would probably be in bed, less miserable than I am now. Miserable and wasted. It’s always better to be both rather than one or the other because then you can pretend one came because of the other. I notice no one is using the fire escapes tonight, which is a sad thing because they’re so wonderfully dramatic, and something I’ve never fully gotten the opportunity to take advantage of living on the first floor my whole life.
It is the last weekend of August and would have been my fourth night in this dump. It only took me two nights to figure out how impossible it is to sleep here. The first night I spent without furniture, sitting wide awake against the paper thin wall in my empty living room eavesdropping on my upstairs neighbor talking to the Korean woman two doors down. He is an older man who reminds me of my grandfather except he likes to use swear words and wear earplugs every night, “just in case”, to help sleep through the alarms. He says “fucking critters like moths and crickets” can crawl into the smoke detectors and set them off but I don’t know if I believe that. But I have decided to believe that the Korean lady two doors down sleeps with pounds of makeup on for exactly this reason. I imagine she dolls herself up every night and probably lays awake in bed for a good two hours waiting. Hoping.
The inhabitants of building 290 congest the stairwell and I let the flow of the crowd carry me down the steps. Riding this sea of sleepy strangers to the parking lot, I keep my gaze lowered to concentrate on these stairs. I focus hard, one step at a time, to keep them from spinning out from under me. Otherwise I know them well, up and down, backwards and forwards. Mostly backwards, and carefully—gripping one end of a coffee table with Allison holding the other end, facing me. She had flown in from Tucson to help me move yesterday because Jack had been tied up with business. I can’t wait to meet her, I had told him. That Allison. She was the most important person in my life who I had never met, and up until last night I was uncertain if she actually existed. My life had pretty much revolved around her for the past four years I’ve lived alone, and all the while I had been convinced she had only been a figment of Jack’s imagination.
I scan the parking lot looking for faces I might recognize. They mingle amongst one another, half dressed and pajama-clad. It feels like an outdoor slumber party with old people. I find the old man from upstairs and watch him dust off a spot on the asphalt for the Korean lady to take a seat next to him. I haven’t heard her speak yet, so I wonder if her English is limited or broken. She nuzzles into his shoulder and he tenderly brushes the hair from her face, pulling it back from her sleepy, heavily mascara-coated eyelashes.
I didn’t know this man’s name yet. He looks like a Ray. But could easily be a Paul or Simon, Jack. And I wondered where my Jack was right now, only I didn’t have to wonder because I knew. He was in Arizona still, living with Allison in a two bedroom house that I had never seen but in my imagination they have one of those red clay statues of a coyote and a large potted cactus by the front door. He could afford those kinds of things in Arizona, not in California, where we had barely gotten by living paycheck to paycheck just to keep the lights on in our San Diego studio.
He had left four years ago, but it was a priority of his to keep in touch with me. The first year, the letters were friendly. He was fine. Busy, but fine. Allison says hi. Hope all is well, write back if you can. I never did. He wrote once every other week, and the letters were delivered to my P.O. box, which I open with a key. I imagine Jack and Allison have their own real mailbox with their address embossed on the side. Or did they have one of those slots in the door for the mailman to drop it through and a little brown dog that comes and fetches it? I thought about writing him back just that once to ask him, but what about Allison. She probably got the mail while Jack was at work. She would be making lemonade or stirring a steel pot of spaghetti with a wooden spoon, and she’d see the envelope on the kitchen table. She’d recognize the feminine handwriting and maybe pack her bags before he even got home, and he’d have to move back to California to pick up where we left off. But it wouldn’t matter because Jack hates spaghetti and if he really loved her, the dumb bitch would know that. Still, I could never do that, I told myself. I was not that kind of person. But really, neither was she.
I entertained fantasies like this well into my waking life. I spent my free time daydreaming, imagining we could reach each other through space—tap into supernatural frequencies that could communicate to him, and he’d send them back as clues tucked in secret hiding places, between the lines. I love you, I love, I, you. But in the end I guess it all worked out because four years later he put a ring on her finger and sent her to California to help me pack the last ten years of my life into cardboard boxes and carry them backwards up these two flights of stairs.
Don’t judge me for this, but on my way to the airport to pick her up yesterday, I had considered reasoning with her. A week ago I wanted to lose ten pounds, rent a Mercedes convertible and get my hair done in a really expensive salon because I had to be better than her. I had to be so much better than her that she would feel so dreadful in comparison to me that there would be no use competing at all. But now seeing her waving enthusiastically from the baggage claim I was ready to come clean and tell her everything about my pathetic lonely life, how I’d been evicted, how I imagined she’d have blonde hair instead of red and how I had spent the last four years without him working on ways to turn back time. I could ask her, beg her, to disappear. I even contemplated kidnapping her. I didn’t really map out all the details, but I had a rough sketch of how it could be done. I imagined a rope, something sharp, maybe tying her up and throwing her in the back of a van. But I didn’t have a van, I had a Jetta with a trunk that was barely big enough to fit her single suitcase much less her twenty-eight year old body. So I choked back the tears and opened the passenger door for her instead; I was a desperate girl.
Bitterness and pride would have gotten the best of most women, but not me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and we got along well. She was nothing like I had expected, polite and nearly a foot shorter than me with long red hair. She was more charming than beautiful, of which I had always been neither. I watched her wrap coffee mugs in newspaper and stuff them into a box she had labeled “Fragile” and I imagined us as old friends that had grown up together. Maybe this could be our first bonding experience, what if she was my soul mate? Not Jack. We’d finish moving and she’d decide to stay an extra night and we’d make strawberry margaritas and order Chinese food and laugh and paint each other’s toenails. I’d wait for her to decide she should just move in and we could split the rent and she could decorate the place in trendy furniture and framed posters. Yes, I thought. This should work out nicely.
There wasn’t a lot to carry, but it took us all afternoon and late into last night to move everything into my new place in building 290. Fortunately, I had packed all of Jack’s things days ago. My good luck charms were the belongings he had decided he could leave behind, things for whatever reason he chose to live without for however long, while promising he would return for them as soon as he got good and settled. I felt ashamed, silly for holding onto all these pieces of Jack in hopes that he’d be back. How pathetic she would think I was if she knew I still slept in her fiancée’s nightshirts or continued taping his favorite television programs. Or maybe this would soften her, make her feel sorry for me and she’d feel so guilty she’d have no choice but out of human kindness and respect feel obligated to leave him and move out of our lives forever.
It was tragic watching her assemble our old IKEA bed frame. Partly because of how it had been the bed Jack and I had purchased, built and slept in together for so long, but partly because of how easily it fell together in her hands. She had no trouble at all fitting together the queen-size pieces, boards and screws. I could have never done it alone, but here she was, those little hands and all those nuts and bolts and Swedish instructions and in a few effortless minutes—there was my bed. Her standing on one side, and me on the other.
Well, I said.
It’s easier than it looks, she said.
You make it seem that way.
I imagined an invisible mirror between us and I was looking at my reflection. I had red hair, a one-and-a-half carat engagement ring, a knack for assembling furniture, and I was the woman he had chosen to love forever. I tilted my head to the left, but my reflection didn’t move. A strange heaviness buzzed the space between us, our bodies separated by the width of a bed, which was really just boards and screws anyway. It hung over our heads, the weight of two strangers who both needed each other so desperately.
I decided I could unpack the rest of the boxes in the morning, it was late anyway, and I was sure Allison was hungry too. Tired.
We ordered in and ate Chinese food on the floor in the most pressing awkward silence. I was using a fork. She, on the other hand, seemed lost in thought while she twirled a noodle between two perfectly poised chopsticks. It was unclear who she was speaking to, me or the chow-mein, when she told me she wasn’t really pregnant.
I’m sorry? I asked, only half surprised. Because I already knew a pregnant woman wouldn’t drag couches and coffee tables up two flights of stairs.
He didn’t ask me to come, she told me. Her words seemed to surprise her, as if they had a mind of their own. We watched them trip out of her mouth letter-by-letter, float warily to the center, resting on the thick tension that separated us.
Of course not, I said kindly and sincerely, resting my fork in the fried rice and closing the Styrofoam box. You were kind enough to volunteer. I couldn’t have done this alone.
Oh, but you could have.
No. I didn’t want to hear it. Even though she was as much of a stranger as my new neighbors are, she had been both my adversary and my ally this whole time. The only difference was that now I had seen her in real life, she wasn’t made up, and not only was she of actual flesh and blood—she was better than me. I said to her, I could never be the woman that you are. But that had been the wrong thing to say.
We woke up this morning and I made coffee and she cried silently the whole way to the airport. In the car I remembered my kidnapping scheme and I felt horribly guilty for ever thinking such a thing. She had been such a huge deal, this enormous idea for the past four years but when I pulled up next to the curb outside the terminal to drop her off, I noticed how small and transparent she seemed sitting here next to me in my car. So transparent I wanted to touch her, if only to see if my hand would pass straight through her. I rested a hand on her shoulder, and she embraced me. We held each other like this for a long time.
I watched her plane take off and I kept thinking, he had to love her, he had to. But he didn’t. He loved me and I know this because he told me so himself. In his letters that arrived once every other week to my P.O. box, then the ones that came more often—once, then twice a week, and over and over in our phone calls, which had always been so few and far between and had now become our routine, late-night trysts.
I left the airport and took the long way home. I parked at a dive bar three blocks from my new home, and tossed back nearly half a dozen vodka tonics before stumbling back to building 290 to crawl up the concrete stairs to my door. That’s about all I can remember, and by now, the fire trucks have pulled up to the building, spinning blue and red spotlights over the parking lot party. I make my way over to the old man and the Korean lady. I pretend out of all the strangers gathered in the parking lot, these are the ones I have chosen to belong to.
“Twenty-minutes at least,” he says to her. “I like how they have us sit out here like, I don’t even know. Like it’s a fuckin’ potluck.” She nods somberly and he continues to pretend to be annoyed, probably to impress her. Meanwhile I am thinking how much better of a story this would be if the building had really been in flames, and we were all watching it burn down together. Or a more romantic idea would be if he was the real culprit who risked a misdemeanor to pull the alarm in hopes to get to second base out here with his lady friend. But for all I knew, it had just been the crickets.
I introduce myself as the new tenant on the second floor, and his name is Martin and her name is Jay. “How much longer do we usually have to wait?” I ask him.
“I won’t stay out here more than five more minutes,” he tells me. “This is ri-goddamn-diculous. If it was the real deal we’d be burnt to a fucking crisp by now.” Then he tells me about the crickets and how it would be so fucking nice if someone could just light this shithole on fire so he could use the motherfucking insurance money to live in an even shittier complex too poor to afford smoke alarms.
I smile, the way a sick person smiles to feel better because it is all mind over matter. The way an actor punches a wall to feel angry, because science has proven action to precede emotion. Laughter can lead to happiness; the way words can eventually lead to believing.
“Maybe,” I say, “eventually the fire alarm will lead to a fire.”
“Are you drunk?”
“A little.” I tell them how I had been evicted from an apartment with a cottage-cheese ceiling, you know, the asbestos kind with the pebbly surface. I told them I continued to live there for four years even though I couldn’t make the payments alone. I had just met her today, I told him. She’s a petite little thing with red hair and she’s really organized and friendly. She is marrying the man I have been in love with for ten years.
Last night she told me she had spent the last two of those years falling out of love. She confessed to me that she was scared of growing old, her time running out. When their love had grown cold, she had kept suspicions unvoiced because of these fears. It wasn’t about love anymore, love had nothing to do with it. It usually never does, she said. She used the pregnancy to keep him from leaving her. It was all she could do to keep the relationship alive. And through fighting for him, she found she learned to love him the way she once had. But by then it was no use, he had given up, he didn’t look at her the way he used to. When she found him late one night on a long-distance phone call to California, she purchased a flight to San Diego for the last weekend of August. She had to leave before she was left.
But he loves you, I told her. He has to. I knew what she needed out of me, even though she didn’t. And the more I said it, the more I believed that he would never, ever leave her for me.
“He isn’t coming back,” I tell Martin and Jay.
“Why would he? It’s the middle of the fucking night. Five minutes and I’m going back in, they can re-evacuate my ass for all I care.”
And ten minutes later I said I liked how we were all out there watching the empty building. Still waiting, like, I don’t even know.
“Like waiting,” Martin had said, “for the fucking Titanic to sink.”
i had been washing dishes in hot water. the hotter the better, my mother had told me upon moving in, because i didn't know anything about anything. and so i had been washing the dishes that had been piling up in the sink.
And it had been the summertime so we had the window open and we could hear everyone moving out of their on-campus apartments and into their parents’ minivans and U-Hauls.
Play me a song, I said.
You sat at my desk and strummed my old acoustic, the same one I’d had since I was thirteen and used to carry home from junior high. When we first met, when I walked the two miles home in the blazing desert sun, down 8th street past Bucklin Park with the ducks, turning left on Centinela before the overpass and then a right on Woodside all the way down, down, down to the dead end where my house stood, same as it always had.
You were in high school, and you carried a Spanish textbook called Dime and we became friends. Your parents were from Mexico and you grew cactus plants in your backyard. I invited you home to meet my cat, Joe, but you were allergic. He loved you and you held him until he fell asleep in your lap and you grew red hives up and down your neck and your eyes would water and we’d have to go outside. I let you play my guitar and it was the best it had ever sounded so it became more yours than mine. When I walked home the following days I took long detours through Bucklin Park, with the dead grass and the green pond and the ducks. Remember the ducks? You say you do, and we feed them bread crusts and sit in the prickly grass and your conversations are well articulated and specific, deep and thoughtful. You spoke in poetry and riddles.
You moved before you graduated, I forget why. You told me, let’s meet on the corner of Centinela and Woodside like old times. We did and I walked you home just as the street lights were turning on, and I said I had to get home before my mother came outside in her nightgown, to wait for me in the driveway with her arms crossed—how embarrassing. We sat on the curb and the sprinklers came on, but it was so hot we didn’t even care that we were soaked. Wet grass, wet hair. I tried to cry, but I couldn’t. You said something profound and kissed the top of my head. I sat there for a long time after you left.
I saw you once a year at around the same time, early Spring, and it was strange because it was like clockwork but at the same time always unexpected. We did Starbucks and drove around, we even went to the park to feed the ducks. I had a boyfriend but you and I had always been awkward friends anyway, closer than “just friends” but not “best friends” and not anything near “more than friends”. So you had two tickets to an old band we used to listen to, except you were in Irvine and I was still in high school. I made it to San Diego for my best friend’s mother’s birthday and my boyfriend went to your college, so he picked me up and took me back with him. But he had baseball practice that evening so you picked me up at night and we napped, showered and went to the concert. They played songs we used to sing to each other before we had a history. You held me and it was the safest I think I've ever felt. We went home and went to bed, our clothes came and off and in the morning you drove me three hours back to the desert. But we didn't say a word to each other, and I think we both felt like we had lost something. It was the last time I felt beautiful.
I followed you after I graduated. I went to your college and waited for you to find me.
We sat on the roof of the theatre and you didn't say anything. You lit matches and watched them burn out in your fingers and your eyes told me that you were somewhere else.
Stop, I said. You’re doing it again.
I didn't see you for a year. Then one day, it was raining and you picked me up after school and I ran out to your car. Wet and breathless, I said Talk to me in poetry and riddles! You drove to that place we saw that concert and you held me in the rain and smoked your cigarettes. We laughed and acted like children and danced and yelled, and we didn’t kiss and I wasn't sure if we really wanted to, but we both were thinking it would have seemed appropriate. You always had a way of making things out to be like a movie.
You went through a crisis the Spring before you graduated. You grew a beard and never left your apartment. You brewed green tea and read books translated from far-away languages and you were dead to the world. You called and asked if we could walk in a park together and eat grapes and feed the ducks and I said sure, sure. But I had forgotten all about it the next day and woke up to a grocery bag hanging on my door full of green grapes. Shit.
You graduate in the morning, I have two more years. You are sitting at my desk and you don’t know what you are doing with the rest of your life. I am folding clothes while you talk about Buenos Aires and you have never even been on an airplane. I didn’t have a fridge until I was eight, you say. And I don’t even know who you are anymore.
I have to get going now, you tell me. Meanwhile I have been running hot water, embarrassed about my sink full of dirty dishes. And now you’re in my kitchen and we sway to The Nearness of You and I think about the desert, and the ducks, and your mother’s garden of cactus plants, I never got to meet her. She doesn’t speak English, I remember you telling me. I think of my cat Joe that you were allergic to and sleeping in your dorm bed with you, showering—I saw you naked, you mention awkwardly now. That was when I was beautiful, I say. You say there was never any closure after that weekend and you ask, What are we?
How can you ask me that now?
This is goodbye, though. For good this time, I don’t know if you understand that.
I know, I know. I know, I say.
We are a complicated set of human souls, you say.
I try not to cry. I am not in love with this person, and he says, I am not in love with you either.
I am in love with the idea of you, every bit of it.
And he leaves me in the doorway alone to watch him walk away. He wishes he had horizon to disappear into. He swaggers. One step, two, three. Stop. I won’t follow you anymore, not if you leave again. And he promises not to come looking for me. He turns halfway, squints one eye closed and with his hands makes a rectangle shape framing my figure in the doorway. He pauses just long enough to burn this mental photograph into his memory, and walks away. I wonder what he sees. A thirteen-year-old walking home in a school uniform, a grey cat named Joe, a long-haired high schooler tangled in his dorm sheets, a long lost friend laughing in the rain, a stranger he feels like he's met before, in a past life, perhaps. I see my past, a history of two people who don't belong together, I see my home. And somewhere else, he has his sunset.
