she's there, in her red plaid flannel shirt, in front of the dueling elephants, an arm lifting from in front of her face and flaring upwards, a human projection of the trumpeting elephant that is clearly winning the fight.
in the next picture, the museum is still sharp and crisp around her, but she's blurred slightly, half doubled-over with laughter.
then she's fierce, all toothy snarl and shortened arms ending in claws, the skeleton of the tyrannosaurus rex looming over her.
somewhere, near the museum's door, I'm mimicking homo technologus. i'm sitting on a bench, listening to a meeting hundreds of miles away, with the increasing confirmation of my suspicions that losing an hour and a half of my vacation was completely pointless, keeping me from making it to the planetarium across the grounds that I'd always wanted to see.
it's also killing my phone. I check the charge periodically. 15%. 12%. 6%. the odds of reconnecting with my friends is draining away.
but, to be honest, they already had.
I don't know how far back to go in telling the story, in doing the analysis. maybe it was the comment she made 103 stories above Chicago, in front of an educational display that described the world expo, and "it's giant ferris wheel." that error, that confusion of the possessive and a state of things frustrated me.
moments before that, hours before that, we were fine. for most of the days before that, for a year before that, we were, most of the time, fine, or better. and, for a brief while during that year, we were closer than fine.
the times that weren't fine had become less and less a matter of wanting to get back to the past. they, also, were the result of the confusion of the possessive and the state of things.
it feels like fewer and fewer things are mine, as if my slow plummet towards the ground has accelerated, pulled by gravity, pushed by my own actions. the friction is building. it strips away the people around me. it rips identity from me. it shreds hope and its images of happier futures. the heat builds in me, frustration at my inability to stop, anger always roiling just under my skin.
we cannot and should not be together, her and I. but we were, once, and she was mine - she held a meaning that no one else could hold, and that no one else would know. where there is and will be no relationship, there is still the link of history and care, that I clutch close as I fall. it's some comfort - if not a lasting one, then maybe one of the last ones.
losing that completely, losing her completely, is what I fear. I've lost it too many times before, and I know I'll eventually lose it here. I'll become just another story in her life, because time and love necessitate it. I've faded in too many memories, been a short chapter or minor footnote too many times before, and every time I move so easily out of someone's present and into someone's past, it's as though I cease to exist for them.
so now, every time she looks away, even though she knows i'm with her, every time I don't think she cares, even when she does, and every time a comment reminds me of the space between us, even though she never moves away, I feel that fear, that it's just more loss. that fear blinds me, and i believe in that moment that she's taking something away from me, compounding the growing loneliness.
and then, it's anger that I can't control the state of things, that the possession of a heart seems to be taken away.
so there, together, a quarter of a mile above the earth, i set fire to the morning, the weekend, the months, the year we had shared. with a few undeserved words, and days of not talking to her, I touched the torch to all I feared losing, and to myself, determined to burn it all to ash.
we would go longer than we ever had without talking, and without resolution. I would, finally, apologize. she would forgive me.
I don't yet know how charred her heart or our friendship are by the arson. but I look at the pictures of her being an elephant, at her laughing, at her smiling and laughing around the museum, and I wasn't there. or maybe, I was, in the background, sitting on a bench, an angry ghost, a remnant of a coming past, a fading story that eventually might not even be retold.
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