Segment 14

         I can’t relay. I’ve got a tangible wispiness, I’m not like anything that resents the air and I can’t find a piece of me that might speak something that I wish to say. To fall. Where? Is there a place even to go? I want to get out but every door is an entrance and nothing swings toward me. The building is tilting and I’m going down the hallway, sliding down the floor, it’s the wall, it’s friction keeping me moving, keeping me from any motion that might represent escape.
         I’m not in summer. Men, why don’t you rally? Find my flag and bear me away. I’ve fallen and I need to depart the field. I hear your sweet voices, somewhere out of step, slipping to me through the membrane and it’s victory, it is. But I’m not part of it. I’m here, bleeding into nowhere. This has tipped me. I’ve hit concrete, the ash blasted vestiges of this departed time. I’m inhabiting the spaces I couldn’t fully occupy the first time around. I’m a witness but there’s nothing more to see. Rescue? What meaning does that have, when everything is broken? If I could be saved, what of it then? It doesn’t change the future or the past and the present remains too fluid, utterly volatile. I’ve got an image. A picture of you, flailing in your death spasms, vomiting out your own spirit, to be dispersed on the uncaring air. And I’ve been trying to get away from it, but every instance is just one step too close. Every door leads back into where I came, but nothing gets me out.
         Oh, you gruesome heat, bearing down. I see a shadow and it’s me and it’s not me. Too small. My fingers slip through pavements, the cracks can’t grab hold of me. This boy, what do I tell him, now that I see him sitting there? I recognize it all, transposed. My house, there you are. Who are you now, since we left and took everything of ourselves away. This street, so quiet in the warmth, you could sit in the middle of it for hours and never be threatened. No cars no people. I never did that. I was never allowed. I’m sitting on the curb, as small as I am. My face, concentrating and serious. What do I tell myself, on this day? What wisdom can I impart, where I’ve barely got any for myself. I could tell you the future but it’s going to happen anyway. You’re going to lose everything and gain everything and it will be years before you wonder if it was all worth it. But that was never the question. The only way to make it worthwhile is to keep going, no matter the bodies that you leave behind. Only the dead have given up and it’s not their fault but oh it’s a grim loss anyway. All of us are gone at some moment. At some point we just don’t exist anymore.
         He’s drawing time, this boy. I’m sketching echoes on the street, circles and lines, tracing out the path with chalk. I don’t know what it’s even supposed to be. A car, maybe. I was never good at this, at taking the things in my head and making them physical. The world was always better at doing that for me, eventually taking what my imagination couldn’t construct and stringing it out for me. I’m watching myself and I have no idea what the hell I’m even trying to do. What is that? If anyone ever told me that I was a good artist they were either lying or blind. It’s a basic figure and I’m screwing it up. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe you don’t know how wrong something is, or how to make it right, if you don’t do your best to fashion it incorrectly. If you can’t draw the two sided triangle it doesn’t mean you’re a failure it just means you’ve found out what the rest of us already knew. My shadow is stunted, the sun is high and I’m in shorts. I’ll probably get a sunburn and my mother will fuss over me. Where’s her voice now, so long drained away? Call me a fool, if you will, to discard everything before I ever really had it. You have to be here somewhere. None of this has been without you. It’s because of you, that I’m reeling back and forth. I did it to myself, but I did it because of you.
         There’s no other kids on the street. I remember that, the same way I remember how the air smells when it’s just about to snow but it hasn’t yet, when the invisible is filled to bursting. It’s not soemthing you can consciously recall but it’s there anyway. But not in the summer. I hear children somewhere, laughing and screaming. Maybe there’s a pool nearby. By the time I was old enough to explore the street, I didn’t care anymore. There were no mysteries left except for the ones that I tried to manufacture. And the hardships that I created for myself, by telling myself it was the only way. If I’m lucky the ice cream truck will trundle by, singing a merry tune and taunting me to catch it. But I never did. By the time I would run into the house it would already be gone, turned some idle corner and sliding into some new journey. Perhaps if I kept running our paths would cross again. There were secret ways, that took you behind the town. I walked down them once and wondered where all the sound went. Everything seem draped in grey and my mother told me never to go that way again. I couldn’t find the way if I tried. You don’t understand, once you’ve marked the path you’ll never get there by the same method again. I only pass this way once, I’m told. But here I am again, coming from a different angle. In my small way, I draw a box, taking care to make sure each line is straight when it’s all jagged anyway. I’m terrible at this. God. Maybe I’m trying to write my name, before I understood what names meant, before I knew how someone could say your name and even though you had one the most common names in the world, shared by more people than you could ever count, you knew they were talking to you and referring to you and talking about and nobody else. The tone of a voice. The slash of a look. Where are you? You have to enter the scene soon. I’m wise to the game now. If they can’t find me I have no choice but to play along. I have to drench myself and indulge.
         My skin is so thin I can’t feel it. The rhythm of thudding time. I knew every step. Can’t any of you help me? Can’t you stop this? My neighbors never left their houses. I could watch them die as the years curdled. But I don’t. Because I don’t care. There’s ripples in the fabric and it’s drawing it all to me. I’m not the center. You are. You always were. Dammit. I strike the concrete with the chalk, watch myself scar the pavement with a jagged line. It’s lightning, it’s war and I’m receiving radio signals from the future, drawing battles that I’ll never see, that are happening in a place where you can touch the air and watch it shimmer. I can’t know. I’m just a kid. You read too much into things, you bastard. You always did. I did. I’m losing perspective. No, that’s not all I’ve lost. Where are the shadows? Where did they all go?
         A black curtains falls, slowly, suddenly, all too small. I don’t look up. Am I remembering this, or is it time itself, being unspun like a film, a loop I’ve stepped into? Can I be inside myself, lost in memory? This place, is that the arc of the interior of my skull, the shape the roof makes that you form when the walls have nowhere to go but in. The colors here aren’t true. The shadow barely covers me. I don’t look up. There’s chalk to be had, scattered on the uncaring street. All the marks I’ve left had been washed away. In the end no one will ever know that we knew each other, I’ll carry you because I have no choice but that was taken away from you. It’s like we never met. I can’t wrap my head around it. If we went back to the beginning, maybe I could scar a deeper cut, to make people believe. But it’s all blank looks now. When someone goes away they take a piece of you with them. They take an angle of you that you couldn’t see on your own, because we’re blind in so many directions. That perspective is gone. I’ll never have it, the way you saw me, the gravity you exerted, it’s disappeared. I’m liberated, but I don’t have anywhere to go. The shadow regards me. There’s a stain on my shirt, probably from lunch. Why my mother ever let me out, I don’t know. It’s parallel with mine now, we’re pointed in the same direction. A trick of the light, it’s so much shorter. I’m grey texture, still defined. I’ve got a moment. No, I don’t. It’s everything, just to try and remember. To let the story unfold.
         “It’s not right,” you say, and of course you’re sitting next to me, the heels of your shoes tucked tight against the curb. It’s funny, it’s so odd how young you always looked, like you’re body was in a constant race to catch up with your age. Here, you’re a babe, at the start. But I can see the path’s end. Bear me away already. How much more am I supposed to see? Spectral hands take hold, find something solid. Pull me out of this and let me rest on what I’ve already seen.
         “What do you mean?” I ask. “It’s fine , there’s nothing wrong with it.”
         You sigh, roll your eyes. Boys , I can hear the echo made coherent. Your feet scrape forward and you trace the outlines with a finger. “It doesn’t look like a pony at all.”
         “That’s because it’s not a pony,” I reply, sneering the words. “It’s a . . . a tank,” I tell you, not really convincing myself, then or now. If I say so. If that’s what I really think. “It just needs . . . ah, wheels and stuff.” I sketch them in, poorly.
         “No, it’s not,” you say matter of factly. “But it could be a pony,” you say, snatching up a spare piece of chalk and drawing a set of stick shapes that are probably supposed to represent legs.
         “Hey,” I say, without any real authority. “Hey.”
         “And this could be a tail,” you tell me, with real glee, getting into the work now, you’re rewriting a new world, taking what I had and making it your own. Even the lines you redraw in your own colors, obliterating my original intent, if I even had any.
         But perhaps I did. “Stop that, it’s not . . . that’s not a tail, it’s not a horse,” I tell you. I still have my own weapon and I take the tail and try to turn it into a gun. “This is, it’s the turret and here’s an . . . army man.” The attempt is there, a stick man written into the top of the world, no doubt wondering how we wound up in such a crazy place. I feel for him, in a way. A single brush of a hand and his existence is nothing more than dust. Our shadows mingled, intertwine.
         “It’s a house,” you say, with a sense of developing wonder, putting a roof on top of the tank. “And he’s just moved in and he’s waiting for his wife to come.” And you draw another stick person, a little more defined than mine. “They’re a mommy and daddy and they have two little babies.” And so they do. And so they join.
         “It’s not a house,” I protest. “It’s a . . . spaceship.” There I am, laying down the seeds. There’s sunlight peeling through me, ligth has mass but I don’t. “And they’re all going to Mars.” Another crude circle marks the destination. You’ve already started drawing a tiny path to the front door, complete with walkway stones, when I drop this little revelation.
         You take it in stride. “Yeah, that’s fine,” you say, crossing your arms and settling back, admiring the mess of our dual handiwork. “They can go there to live and raise little babies there.”
         I’m not sure what to make of this. “Okay, but first they have to go to, ah . . .” you’re staring at me, hands on your lap, the chalk at your feet. What I’m trying to say is compounded by the fact that I probably don’t know any other planets other than Mars. Not yet, at least. “After Mars,” I draw some idle lines, indicating places outside the realm of our knowledge, fearless explorers. With babies. And, you’ve drawn flowers on what’s supoosed to be the lawn of the spaceship. Some of them have smiley faces in them. “They could go and . . .” I stutter a few more partial words, then quit while I’m ahead. I hang my head, in shadow, in outline. “I guess they could live on Mars, with their babies.” I barely hear myself. I didn’t lose, but I certainly didn’t win.
         “Great,” you say cheerily.
         “Yeah,” I answer.
         “That was fun,” you tell me, stamping your feet a little bit.
         “Mm,” I say, trying to look deep in thought. A few seconds later, I turn to you and ask, “Who are you?”
         “Hi,” you say brightly, cocking your head a little to the side, as if that answers everything. “We just moved in down the street. It’s nice to meet you.”
         “It’s, um, yeah,” I say, not sure how else to answer that. If I had any manners I’d probably shake your hand. I don’t remember how most of this went, it’s too far buried, I’m too distant from it. We make up our own memories after a while and somehow convince ourselves that was how it really happened. I’m afraid of that, we’re going to conspire and turn you into something that you weren’t and we’re all going to pretend that’s how you really were, because you’re not here to tell us otherwise. I can hear it now, in sideways echoes, like doors slamming down, the rewriting of time. We have a signature but the letters make a deeper imprint than we realize. Where are you now? And what do we replace you with, now that you’re not here. I’ve lost the smell of you. In windy time it’s scattered.
         “I just moved here,” you say again, like you can tell I’m not following this completely. “How long have you been here?” You turn around, twist. “Is that your house? Where are your mom and dad?”
         It’s like dodging missiles, even as young as I was, I can see the symptoms in my own eyes. I pick a question, answer it for my own health. “I live there,” I say, pointing to my house. Of course, I go with the easiest one. “In that house.”
         “Oh, we’re right near each other,” you say, though you haven’t really said where you live. It isn’t that close, across the street and down a few houses, I have no idea why you wandered all the way over here in the first place, or why your parents let you go away. They probably didn’t know, and by the time they did there wasn’t much they could do about it. “We’re like neighbors,” and having not really defined the concept myself, I can’t really argue.
         “How old are you?” I ask, desperate to grab the reins of the conversation somehow and take control of it anyway I can. So, stupid question it is. My voice is shaped like illogical bricks, falling down into spaces that won’t compress. I’m losing it, backwards and forwards, I can’t break away and I can’t stay here. I have to go. God damn it.
         “Five,” you say, almost immediately, a practiced answer.
         I stare at your face, not knowing much about kids but having some general idea of what the numbers mean. At that age it was all less than abstract, people told you how old you were and all you knew was that you got presents on the days when the numbers changed.
         “Are you sure?” I ask.
         “Yup,” you say with confidence. Sometimes if you turn sideways I think you might disappear. Even then the gauntness wasn’t present in your face yet but there was a certain thinness you couldn’t evade. Even in little kid clothes, it might have been baby clothing, like you had shrunk but the clothes had stayed the same size. “My mommy says I just turned five. I had a party and everything. I would have invited you, had we lived here.” I don’t know why you say this. I don’t think it’s something you actually said, but a notion I implanted later because I thought it was funny. But this is a recording. Everything here is true. My time is a fine clay and it’s shaped by many hands. There are hands, clutching at me from the nowhere spaces. My voice isn’t my name. Soldiers, find your own way home. My light’s gone out and I can’t find the path, I’ll only lead you into danger. Right off the cliff we go. I’m sitting on the curb and I’m staring at you like I’m waiting for you to turn into someone else.
         “Are you really sure?” I ask.
         “You just asked me that,” you comment, frowning a little, disappointed already.
         “Sorry,” I mutter, not really embarrassed but willing to try pretending. “I thought you were younger.”
         “Well, I’m not,” you shoot back, peeved.
         “I know that,” I reply, equally irritated at being yelled at on my own street. The place that used to be my domain and now I have to share it. I remember walking to the edge of the block, like standing on the edge of a kingdom and staring into forbidden lands, unknown territory, staring down the streets ringed with trees on both sides, watching the passing cars and trying to figure out where they all went, where it was all connected.
         “I’m the same age as you, I bet,” you press the point and you’re right, of course. But it wasn’t that great a leap, to be honest. That’s what I tell myself.
         “Yeah, you are,” I say, turning my head away a little bit, trying to muffle my words.
         “That’s great,” you exclaim, almost clapping your hands with delight, the shifting of your moods giving me whiplash. My encounters with girls were few and far between at this point, the odd cousin, the stranger who might babysit me every so often. This, for me, was first contact. “I bet you’ll go to the same school as me.”
         “Maybe, I don’t know,” I answer, my mind definitely not thinking about school at all. The weather was too nice, the whole month was stretched out ahead. Where was school? In some place I would never reach. I didn’t have to worry about it, I had forever to not be there. “So? So what?”
         “Maybe we’ll be in the same class, then,” you say, with more enthusiasm than I can muster. You almost grab me but something in my body language stops you. Or perhaps I shy away, not willing to go this step yet. “Wouldn’t be that neat, we’d already know each other. I’d know someone before school even started.” You’re getting more and more excited as the scenarios pile over each other in your head, you’re not even waiting for one to finish playing out before another takes its place. “Maybe we’ll even sit next to each other.” You give me a smile then, and I don’t know what it means. I do now, I think, in some smaller moments. The curve of you is a slash across my memory. I can see the horizon, sometimes and there are faces present that I can’t name. I can keep it together, I can try but I don’t know what will happen, if I can make it across the barrier intact and if I stay in one piece, what kind of piece will I be? You can be intact without being all right. They put a man back together one time and it was all wrong. Legs and arms and eyes, all wrong. But he didn’t come apart. It was all so very seamless. You can stay the way you are, but that doesn’t mean it’s the way you have to be. Or want to be.
         “We might be,” I venture, not really sure where this is going.
         “I think we will be,” you say with a certainty I can’t match. Your eyes widen, as another thought occurs to you. “Maybe, hey, maybe we can walk to school together. It’s not that far and my parents won’t let me go by myself but since you’ve here maybe that will be okay.”
         “Ah, sure,” I say, staring straight ahead at the street, at the weird amalgamation of boy and girl thoughts strewn all over the ground. By the next rain it will be all gone. I know how this works. I should have taken a picture, caught our shadows in it. These moments. I try to impress something on myself here, but I’m not part of it. I’m not part of time. But it runs through me, I’ve got years burning up my veins and a pressure building in my mind that could explode into a disjointed calender. One day does not lead into the next. That’s a lie, a vicious damn lie. We put it together, after the fact into the sequences we think make the most sense. Maybe it really happened this way, in this order. The only logic that exists is the one you impose. And even then, as long as it never conflicts. The stars will write out every name, if you give it enough variation.
         “I’ve never done it before,” you say. “But it would be fun, just to walk, without my parents around.”
         “If we don’t get lost,” I add, apparently assuming the idea is already a foregone conclusion.
         “Don’t be silly,” you respond. “How can we get lost, it’s right . . . over that way,” you point in a vague direction that may or may not be where the school is. “I know where it is,” and I’m thinking that it might be a bluff, “and I just moved here. You’ve been here for how long?”
         “A little while,” I say, not really sure, since nobody had ever asked me that question before. Time was meaningless to me at this point, the calenders were just numbers. At one point I thought the years changed with every month, because it happened from December to January. That’s when I started paying attention, I guess. And now it makes no difference at all. My hourglass is people, and what time does to them. Or what it refuses to do to help.
         “And it’s just a straight line,” you continue, and maybe you aren’t bluffing as much as you seem. But maybe not. Beyond the block is the world and the world is an undefined place, where things don’t lie in relation to each other, they don’t always exist where you would suspect them to be. “You can’t mess that up.”
         “I get lost a lot,” I admit, and it’s true. I am now. I always had a wandering eye for the other paths, for the routes that might take you to the right place but by the time you get there you might be changed, you might see things that other angles couldn’t show. I wanted to see different things, and it didn’t matter how much it took me out of my way, as long as the scenes along the way could show me things I’d never seen before. The secret world behind your backyard, in the places you couldn’t fathom.
         “In your own town?” you ask, frowning. “That’s silly, I can’t even imagine.”
         I shrug. “I do, sometimes.” I fold my hands together, very adult, do my best to wriggle out of the fate already planned for me. “Are you sure you still want to walk with me?”
         “Sure,” you say, without hesitation. “It’ll be fun. And besides, maybe you get lost because you don’t have someone with you.”
         I consider this. “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
         “I do,” you say. Our first argument, right there.
         I don’t say anything, I don’t really have anything to say. I could prove you wrong later, take you meandering down roads you didn’t know existed, chatting up such a storm that we would be well off track before you even realized you didn’t know where the hell we were. It’s all misdirection, done with mirrors, the trick of pulling you to a place while taking you to another one entirely. About time you tried the same trick on me, pulling me to places that I knew where already there but had never seen. But I think I’ve seen too much. There aren’t any revelations left. Nothing that I can stomach anymore. Someone point me to a window, I want out.
         “So what do you want to do now?” you ask suddenly, pushing at me a little bit. Sitting that close to me made me realize how impossibly warm you were, a knot of energy all bundled up in too small a space. It had to escape somehow, it had to be released but the trade off was that it left you behind. You couldn’t live in service to it anymore and something had to give. Had to go.
         “I, ah,” and this wasn’t something I had really considered. “I was just going to stay here and . . . draw, I guess.”
         “All day?” you say. “That’s boring.”
         “Well maybe to you,” I reply. “But I’m doing fine by myself.”
         “But don’t you want to do something else?” you ask, crossing your arms. “I know,” you say, sitting up straight, “we can go to my house-“
         ”I don’t want to,” I say, bristling. “I’m fine, right here.”
         “Come on,” you almost beg. “I don’t want to stay here all day.”
         “You don’t have to,” I point out. “Why would you want to? Go home, then. Nobody’s forcing you.”
         “Yeah, but-“ you look at me then, eyes wide and what’s in them I can’t read properly. At least not then. Now, I think I can see what you were trying to say, before the moment washed it off. Written in chalk, our thoughts don’t remain stable, they’re scraped faintly onto a hard surface that won’t retain and with the first sign of bad weather they’re gone, replaced with a dirty slate. You make a small noise that I don’t catch. It’s the onset, perhaps.
         “What?” I ask, standing up, an errant slice of chalk still in my hand. I want to make you go away but I don’t want you to leave. I have friends but I’m not used to other people. “Why can’t you leave?”
         It’s like you expand, somehow. I really can’t explain it. Sometimes when you see a film and it slips off the reel and everything becomes tilted and you see multiple images, all fractions of seconds apart all at the same time, that’s how it seems when someone starts to fall apart. I’m seeing afterimages, ghosts nested in ghosts nested in spirits. There aren’t any other people around and I’m caught in a viscous time, I’ve watched it flow down glass, with all the screaming pointed in on itself, tumbling down the endless slide. You can smear it and it bends but you’ll never stop the descent. It’s so smooth. And it pricks. I feel it tugging at me, those little thorns poking into my stomach. I’m trapped in the bubble and the only way is down and there’s still no bottom in sight. Why can’t you get me out? You promised. You said you’d extract me before it got too bad. It’s bad. What are you doing, with your face turning so red? I’ve got the pieces but not the map. It’s all just abstract.
         What are you doing?
         The cough erupts, a volcano without debris. It always struck me as funny that your coughs were born in you fully formed that you’re body grew larger as the years went on but the magnitude of the expulsion never really changed. They were physically debilitating when you were older, in your younger days they were absolutely devastating. I stand there watching as you hunch over on the curb, your entire body shaking violently, each sound ripped from you like your insides are trying to suddenly exit the rest of you and seek freedom in some greener pasture, in a body not so doomed to early ruin. It slips and fades and strengthens, forces you to blur, vibrate, the noise dropping somewhere deep in the bass end, emanating from a place beyond your body, your lungs a portal to some darker zone, funnelling fluids and mucus into your whatever space they could. You were the conduit and this was the exhaust.
         This is the first time I’ve seen this and I don’t know what to do. It’s like a seizure except you’re still conscious, your arms wrapped around your legs, trying to compress your body and force it all out.
         “Are you . . . what’s wrong, what are you doing?” I ask uselessly, trying to keep my voice level, trying not to panic. I look too calm but I’m out of my depth. There’s no one around. I have to handle this on my own. You spasm and jerk, trying to keep it under control and trying not to stop it so that it passes as quickly as it can. Your face is red now, I can see you from the side, I’m leaning closer to you. I might have asked you again if you’re okay but you haven’t answered. Maybe that’s why I’m closer. You can’t tell that I’m here, you have your eyes closed with the effort of everything.
         “What’s going on? Are you all right?” I ask loudly, nearly shouting into your ear. You move your head but I can’t tell the answer, it could go either way. The coughs are coming further apart now, losing potency although still harsh enough to keep you from sitting up straight. It’s wearing you out, already you appear older, in this sunlight, lines on your face where only smoothness was before. You wore it well though, you had no other choice. It’s driving me mad, watching you like this, helplessly letting your body wreck you, until you had no other choice but to depart.
         “Please stop,” I ask, nearly pleading. I tap you on the back, like you’re a baby. I can feel your spine, the knobby trail of it running down your body. Under your skin is a boiling ocean, pulsing and thrashing. A cough comes, another a few seconds later. They’ve ramped down, are barely anything at all. Your face is nearly at your knees, all the action has made your hair slightly disheveled, it falls in your eyes, prohibits you from seeing me, or I seeing you. But you are there and I’m next to you. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why I stay. I know why, it’s what led to me to do all the things that I have done. When someone is there you have to help them, even if you don’t know what’s going on.
         And you do stop, after an excruciating time. But you don’t unbend, you remain where you are, hunched over, your ribs rising and expanding with the effort of deep breaths.
         “What was that?” I ask, when bravery overcomes me. “Why do you do that?”
         “I . . . ah . . .” you open your eyes, exude a tiny cough, try to sit up straight and only make it halfway. “I don’t . . . ah, know,” you finish, squeezing your eyes shut at the end.
         I’m standing now, watching you. Your breath comes in gasps and you seem near to crying for some reason, like you’ve forgotten where you are and now you’re in a place where no one can help you. I know the feeling, waking up and remembering that a hole used to be in my chest and now it’s not there but the people who put it there may want to put it back. Help arrives but it may not be the form you want or at the time you desire.
         “Are you okay?” I ask, feeling bolder.
         “Y-yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine . . .” you respond with some steel, still unable to unwrap yourself from the coccoon you’re huddled in. You shoot a glare at me, chastising me for even asking. I don’t look away but I do blink. “I’m all right.” It comes out ragged and you suppress a motion that your body will make you pay for later.
         “You’re not okay,” I state bluntly.
         “I don’t know,” you say, after a moment and for the first time I see you scared, some place just shy of frightened. “This is the way I am.” Your eyes are too big, I see too much. I don’t know how to tell you that I don’t know what it means.
         I nod to myself, crouch down so that we’re nearly eye level to each other. “What do you want to do, then?”
         “Go home,” you say, perhaps. It’s a whisper and I can’t really hear. Or I’m not listening. It’s the same result.
         I stand up once more. “Fine,” I say. “That’s fine.”
         “I’m sorry,” I hear you say, and I don’t know why and I don’t know who you’re saying it to. Either way, I pretend not to hear.
         You stand up, your legs shaking slightly. The color that was infused you has drained from your skin, leaving you pale. You brush hair out of your face with an annoyed gesture and take an experimental step toward me.
         “Let’s go,” I tell you. What I’ve already decided, I can’t say.
         You nod, swallowing and biting your lip. This day will fade, you know. Like everything else, you won’t remember exactly how you felt in a moment, just the memory of how you thought it was and what you suspected you did. I trick myself but the day reminds me of it every chance I turn.
         We take two steps before you speak.
         “Don’t get us lost, please,” you say quietly, flatly. But there’s a smile hidden somewhere on you.
         I stare at you for just a second before I see it. Then, with a small smile of my own, I say, “You go first, then.”
         You go ahead and my vision angle falls down and I see the two of you caught in the halo of a setting sun, the fireball dropped down our street and it catches me in flames, obliterating the whole scene, drenching it in stark whiteness, leaving the figures of us frozen, washed out, one step into a journey that will take us away, together and alone and eventually to places separated by barriers that neither of us can breach.
         I’m sorry, you say and it hits me like a dart, causing me to crumble into blocks, into tiny bricks, into too many goddamn pieces.