I have seen you many times
I have seen you many times. We held eye contact as the elevator closed, you mouthed a word I could not read through the window of a bus, dared me to approach from behind a fortress of your friends. This is how a leaf flickers in a constant breeze, its flickering, also, cannot be disturbed.
A city is an aggregate, a statistical ensemble, it does not matter how random I am, there is a graph of how we shop, of when our lights go on. The traffic pulses, orderly, like the signals on a wire, and you stand across from me at the intersection, there, through the gaps between the cars—if they passed at thirty-two gaps per second, I could say you were in a film.
We pass each other ten thousand times a day and learn to never dwell. Next to you on the plane, I fantasized that it would crash, at least that we would think so. I imagined our introductions, your name, telling you I take pictures. If I had my camera out, I would take some then, honest shots the impact would obliterate.
This city burned to the ground. Maybe today the bomb goes off, it has been waiting in a skyscraper’s utility penthouse and the light from it is like ten thousand suns. Our shadows, all our shadows, look like chalk stains flaring out from the intersection where you and I are standing, we are in the fireball, it has caught the air itself on fire, evaporated the city core, sucked glowing embers high into the clouds and turned the two of us invisible.
The radioactive dust begins to settle, it lands on your arms and shoulders and on your head, and it is like the two of us have risen from it, a new species. We make a skin of ash, rubbing it in like charcoal sketches of ourselves.
We are mute, now, but then we always were, and as we wander the landscape after this apocalypse, there is always dust to trace in. You write that our stories are told with light and I write back, what I always wanted, most of all, was to hear you laugh.
Perhaps I love this because it’s my near home town, and you finally updated. But I feel that this is the best you have done as of yet; the wait was worthwhile. Thanks for this particular Lovesick.
if you are who i think you are, can you just let me know?
and i promise not to close my eyes when i see you.
This makes me want to moan with the sound of the subway, and cry, and lean over the counter to breathe on the neck of my coffee slinger crush(es) and tell them too much too close.
And I’m glad to have read it. It calls to moments in my memory and pulls at my heart.
I loved this post… <3
everything i have tried to shut down comes back>>
This certainly is beautiful.
The idea that only a catastrophe could disturb the equilibrium of non-more-than-eye-contact the protagonist and the other character share seems very life-like; I don’t know why, but for me, it captures nicely how I often feel in day-to-day life.
“our stories are told with light”, just like the movie the protagonist almost sees the other character in and the leaf that flickers in the wind, the pictures the protagonist would take.
I’m not quite sure about the city as a statistical ensemble; is that the reason the protagonist and the other character always meet again despite the protagonist’s randomness, or is the pulse of the city that which almost makes meeting the other character another story told with light?