The sun was threatening to leave early, it was waving some sort of doctor’s note, or late pass, or some other poor excuse. There the two stood, side by side, but not touching, not even at the shoulders. Well, not really. Not physically, anyhow. Any person who wasn’t walk into walls blind could see the red strings that connected them from every angle, attaching them so that no one could miss it, but no one could really see it either. No one who needed to, not yet. They stood together, side by side, watching the colors that flooded the ignorant light blue sky, the pinks battling past the yellows, the clouds fighting on top of all of them, the final unity of the three. The unity was her favorite part, but he didn’t know that. He had never asked what she liked best about the sunset. But had he, she would have told him it was the unity of the colors and the clouds and the universe when it finally agrees that the time is right for the colors of the light to change and stop for a moment to enjoy the view from the sky.
There was something false about the way he was smoking his cigarette. He executed the proper process, could even blow rings, but there was something in his exhale that said he wasn’t quite telling the whole truth. She stared out into the sunset, wondering if the clouds ever felt the way she did right then. The tearing of souls was ironic, the light breaking the apparent bond that lay between the peaks of the mountains, the light breaking through the seemingly attached clouds that hung over their heads, like the guilt that hung over hers. It was the sort of deep seeded guilt that would probably never go away, unless she did something extreme about it, but that was unlikely.
There they stood, again. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the moment in front of him. He could feel some sort of string tugging, around his shoulder or his elbow, wherever it was in between that her head found its place in meters on his arm. With a deep breath, he opened his eyes and looked down to the top of her head. Her hair was crazy, but smooth. It reminded him of the way music wrestled its way out of his speakers, and made him wonder if she ever felt she’d want to hide behind her hair. With the way it hung over her face, she could, fairly easily. Just take it easy, take a breather and relax when necessary. Maybe now was one of those times.
If she felt like something was wrong, she would have known. Most likely. There was a definite possibility of misleading entities finding their way into her thoughts again. The cigarettes next to her were a pleasant distraction from the dull arguments that her thoughts seemed to conjure up. She found it necessary to avoid all involvement of wizardry with her future plans. What could really be accomplished with such a heavy frame of mind setting back what made her herself? There was a reason for all of this, but she couldn’t remember what it was. It got lost somewhere between her Bedsheets, the Bathroom, her Closet, her Clean Clothes, the Stairs, the Car, the Parking Spot, and now, the Current Standing Spot.
He suddenly smiled, remembering what he had seen in the car on the ride over. Her nails. They were painted a light purple color that reminded him of nothing but serenity. Kind of what she reminded him of. He noticed this, and realized he needed to stop reminding himself of things, and just let things go the way they were originally headed, before his dumb memories interceded. Sometimes, these thoughts are wrong for the time of day. What was with his obsession with time today? He knew that it didn’t exist, that it didn’t need to, that it was just a piece of information people used to torment each other and themselves, with numbers always spinning like slot machines through people’s minds, making their minds into train schedule and meeting appointment times and the price of a cup of a coffee at every store within a mile radius. But it didn’t matter. He knew what he needed to do, and fully intended on doing just that.
“Remember that time in the city?” she asked him, using his cigarette to light her own. He remembered. He remembered the restaurant and the dress she had worn and the smell of the spring that was hanging in the cracks of the sidewalk. “No.” he lied. She thought about the table they sat at outside and the perfume she had worn and the smell of spring that had been hanging in the cracks of the sidewalk. It was the first time they had argued, over who should have been the next candidate for the democratic party. It had been nothing substantial, just a realization that they wouldn’t always agree on everything. They had never expected that they would, but weren’t actually expecting it when it actually appeared in front of them, jumping out from behind a stone wall at them, laughing when they startled. That was six months and twenty three or twenty eight days ago. Things had progressed nicely, they had made sense of the fact that they couldn’t always agree, and even occasionally enjoying a disagreement if it sparked some sort of interest.
To her, the beach meant everything. The waves and the sand and the sunlight’s honest sort of reflection off of both meant clarity and reality. There was nothing had could calm her like a day in a bikini slathered in lotion and wearing sunglasses that could have ended World War I. Her resolve was strong to stay out of a War with him, but something was false today. She had seen it as soon as she’d stepped off the last stair and onto the ground that promised her absolutely nothing, seen something that just didn’t look right and while she didn’t know exactly what it was, she intended to do what she needed to do and not break into a house where she couldn’t have found the exit even with a flashlight. The truth was, there was nothing wrong with him. But there was just nothing special about him either. She found those entities she had thought of earlier creeping into her thoughts now. Creeping slowly, but surely enough that time could have stopped and no one would have noticed in their slow creep either. She could have written an entire literary criticism on how his character had developed thus far, and even done a presentation on the continuous change that was bound to occur over the course of a timeline.
He knew he was wrong. He was so tired of waking up and knowing he was wrong, and he was tired of listening to that song that they listened to in the car together, and he was even tired of hearing her voice, when she knew he was wrong too. Things were wrong, just wrong, and nothing else. What a shame to have such time wasting skills and nothing to make up for them with. The spiral in his head was starting to change direction, and things were starting to change in the distant colors of the sky that were still pretending to hide behind the mountains, when all they really wanted was to wait for him to see them once more before they giggled away. They threatened his plans, the way they looked at him like that, almost like they were asking him not to do exactly what he wanted to do, trying to tell him it wouldn’t end as well as he envisioned. The vision was hazy, but it didn’t matter now, it was a vision that would be carried out, and a vision that would be carried out, even if it had to be just based on the principle of the thing. He wondered if she suspected it, if she could see its parking lights through the fog, moving slowly towards her, slow enough to be careful but not slow enough to not feel ambushed. He hadn’t even meant for things to happen this way, but sometimes the fall of the dice has everything to do with gravity and nothing to do with the ways he wanted things to fall. If everything was always falling into place, it wouldn’t ever be called falling, it would be called dropping in for tea, or stopping by to say hi.
Waiting was the hardest part for her. She had spent so much time waiting already, she was bored of watching ticking minutes and tocking seconds and letting a clock control her life. She knew he didn’t believe in time, and quite frankly, while it seemed like a good way of avoiding necessary constraints, she thought it was a stupid idea with absolutely no basis or thought process involved. Just because he couldn’t follow a simple theory of counting and organizing didn’t mean it didn’t exist, it just meant he should spend more time reading and less time doing what he did best. Her anger at him was one of those things that weren’t really what they looked like, that her anger in particular wore a really well stitched costume that hid the little lines that swore that they would give up even the best of dressers. Clothes that had been ripped out of dresser drawers, where they’d laid forever, waiting for a moment of use, and needing to perform in a way that made the light flatter their complexions. She wasn’t angry at him, she was angry at the things that happened that were out of his control and hers, and she was angry that he didn’t care that they were out of his and her control and that he wasn’t trying harder to find the lowest common denominator. The middle seemed to be the most important place for them to meet, but now suddenly he wouldn’t even cross the street until he’d pushed the crossing button at least four times and waited for it to change on the sidewalk. This kind of nonsense would never happen on the beach, she thought, reaching to the depths of pockets that definitely would provide something that she could need.
He looked down at his arm, and noticed a bright red line reaching from her arm to his. It was a brilliant, glowing red that reminded him of fire. It put a warm spot on his arm where it connected him to her, and warned himself that this was the one and only time that this conversation could occur. He turned to face her, stretching the red line that connected them. He took a deep breath and put his hands on his shoulders. “I’m not voting in the election. I don’t want to back any of the candidates that I can choose from.” She stared straight back at him. “I know that. That’s not the problem. The problem is that you can’t expect change that you’re not going to create. There’s nothing wrong with objecting to an evil, but you can’t object without having a better plan and being part of a bigger idea. And that’s the same reason that we don’t have anything more to talk about.” Her relief was overwhelming. His embarrassment was overwhelming. He had known he was wrong but not this wrong. And that’s what happens when you don’t tell the whole truth.
-LBR
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