Your life ends in a blinding white gymnasium of a room. I have been there before and know how to part the rain as it falls above only you. Gently, palms down thumbs out like brushing hair from your face. Quick, palms curled like parting curtains.
I am conducting a grand orchestra of failure, but don’t know it yet.
The storm only lasts a while I say and you nod not really listening, peeling off wet clothes and leaving them behind you like disappearing breadcrumbs. Nothing lasts too long at the end, I follow, except, y’know, the end.
There is a running tally of all that’s going on, the emails you’re missing, the conversations happening in your absence, a way of keeping track how the world moves without you. And if you have been here before, as I have, you can opt out, take meetings to prove that there is still something left for you to do.
I have an appointment mid-afternoon and i have seen how it plays out – an escape route through the underground. above us, mosquitoes the size of torpedoes frozen in blocks of something more permanent than ice or concrete. It’s safe to come out.
You are scared, or maybe I want to believe that you are and need me somehow because when you kiss me, I let you, I lose track of time. And it doesn’t feel good or bad, doesn’t feel anything and I’m overcome with this profound sadness because in my head I had imagined it better, imagined it more.
And the day moves on and I am looking at the clock, watching the room morph from one stage to another, the lights dimming, nearly extinguished, one eye on where the door would be. You have to make a choice, you tell me and I look at you with a soft sort of outrage, the edges dulled by the disappointment that you can’t realize I already have.
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