Segment 11

         I’ve got autumn in my veins. It’s pushing through me, silvery sideways blades, cutting me up and leaving me in places that I can’t find. I watch the leaves explode in color, outside your house. The tree, where we used to hide in plain view, because it was a blind spot for your parents, they couldn’t see us from the windows. We’d say our goodbyes in that secluded spot, after walking home from school joined at the hand, steal a kiss in an inverted moment, something to sustain us. With the leaves falling down around us, nature itself trying to camouflage what we were doing, a chill in the air telling us it was time to move along.
         I’m back there now, moving up through space, through time. I’m watching it change as I inhabit, the curtains shifting, the decorations, a pumpkin replaced by a turkey, by an empty Santa Claus hat. You had a porch, and no one I ever knew did. But you didn’t have chairs for it, so we’d steal chairs from your kitchen and sit outside and watch the people walk by and comment on them, whispering to ourselves, insisting the person had heard, pretending to discuss other things when your parents came out, looking for their furniture. I’m sure they heard, through the screen door. I’d sit there and feel the nip in the wind and know that time was moving forward, that there was always progress, even when we were sitting still. I can’t say this, I can’t tell you but I know how it was.
         The sky darkens, snow drifts down. I’m climbing now, into the air, toward the sky, toward the second floor of the house, the windows opaque to me, I’m not close enough. Flakes are falling through me, heavy ones, salting the ground and making it white, freezing the scene and crystalizing it, forcing the world to be empty and pure, regardless of what it actually was. Winter was never good for you, although you enjoyed it as much as any other season. But you lost heat too quickly, your body refused to retain it. So you wore a heavy coat that nearly swallowed you and huddled near us for warmth. I bought you a hat that I thought looked cute but I had one of your girlfriends give it to you, so you wouldn’t know it was from me. You commented to me that it was an odd choice for a girl to pick out, but you wore it anyway. Maybe I’ll tell you, if I ever see you again. Maybe I already did and you told me that you knew all along. I remember holding your hand through gloves, two extra layers between us, how different it felt, how much more substantial it made you feel, not as thin and fragile. But we couldn’t coat you or cushion you, eventually all the layers would have to go away.
         Everything has taken me down, but here I am going up. Time is slipping around me like old skin, sloughing off, the seasons are sliding into new patterns when I move closer to the house. Leaves are fading, disintegrating before me, dissolving into the soil for new trees, not coming back again, not in ways that we can perceive. Snow forming on the roof, in clumps, a sheath forming that coats the house, a weight that becomes a layer, a protection against something we can’t even name. I see your parents through a window like time blurs, the glass hiding nothing, your mother’s clothes changing like a madman’s dream, from one to the other to the next, with no pause, no hesitation in sequence. Outside one car is replaced by another, appears and disappears. I’m up to your window now. I feel a river groan around me and slow. The snow thins, thickens, remains. It’s stopped, the weather has ceased, but its traces mark us all.
         I see you. There’s a glare on the window and it’s me. I cast a shadow that mimics the trees. On the ground a man appears and waves to me and then disappears like a broken transmission. It might have been me, telling the stranger to get off the roof. What can I say? What could I say, had I known? Don’t worry, you’ll be here someday. That’s nothing. It means nothing. You’re staring at the window, curled up on your bed, legs tucked under you, and you’re staring at me. But I’m not here. Your face is emotionless, I can’t read it. I think I know what day it is. The air, it reeks of change and that’s not right, not in this season. Everything goes into stasis in the winter, it slows down. Everything is the same. Only the year is altered.
         I reach for you. I don’t know why. We’re operating on two different planes here, the unchangable, the already transpired. That’s where you are. I’m the helpless and the trapped, barred in by my own circumstances, watching the movie but not affecting the outcome. And the water is rising. And the exits are blocked. And I have no desire to leave anyway. The projector could break and I’d still be there, I’d rather stay, watching the empty frame, ensconced in what could be a terrifying darkness. The glass is the movie but instead of stopping me, I push right through, falling into your room, not so much driven as tugged, following a path I can’t see, a crooked journey through a life I can’t attain or understand or affect. I’m in your room and it’s so much brighter here, on the floor at the feet of the window. I can’t stand up, I can only look over and see the top of your head. I’m not a ghost. I am. No. A real ghost could interact, could change things or move them. But that takes emotion and energy and I have neither, I’m drained into grey, I’m here because I have to be, not because I want to be or need to be. I’m sideways to the exit and I can’t find the route. Part of me hopes that you can rescue me, but why bother, when I wasn’t good enough to return the favor. Why bother, in this place?
         You shift on the bed. I hear someone call your name but it’s caught in a tunnel, I’m still outside, part of me, crosscut in the wind, trying to draw in the pieces of myself that are stretched out. Too thin. Too much and I might just break apart, beyond repair. And then what? What if you find me then, reduced to this, to paper, all torn and ragged? I won’t be a sight then, I’ll be clear, transparent as crystal. That’s what you always wanted. A way to see right through me.
         Someone knocks on your door, lightly, politely. You mutter something, granting entrance. I haven’t been invited in, but isn’t that how the supernatural gains access? To be welcomed, openly? I promise I won’t haunt you, but I can’t find the way.
         “Hey,” a girl’s voice says, as the door slides open quietly. I know her but I haven’t seen her in a long time. A friend, I don’t think she ever liked me. Which was fair enough. I was popular enough, in my way. And it hardly matters now. But that goes without saying.
         “Hey,” you respond, looking tired. You change position on the bed just slightly, allowing just a little more room. Your friend takes the hint and slides into the offered space. The bed bounces you but you remain stable, a ship beached on the ocean.
         “How’s it going?” she asks, one hand absently smoothing folds in the sheets. “You sounded, I don’t know, weird on the phone so I came as soon as I could.”
         “I’m sorry,” you say, absently. You’re staring at me, although you don’t realize. Stop that. Stop looking at me in that way. I never meant it, whatever I did. “I didn’t know, I didn’t want to make you worry. I couldn’t hear what I sounded like.” You run a hand through your hair, shaking something free of it. Memories. Maybe. “Probably like a crazy person. That wasn’t what I wanted.”
         “I’m sure,” she says, tracing an outline on the bed that might be a face. She smiles then. “But I wasn’t worried about you. You’re saner than any other person I know.”
         “That’s not how it feels,” you respond, drawing a little deeper into yourself. You’re suffused with tension, it’s blurring your form, as if you’re about to slip out of joint with everything around you. It would be an escape, to do that. But also an exile. “And you can worry about me, a little bit. It’s okay, I won’t mind.” There’s offhand humor in the way you say it, but something else, too. Something’s that breaking you down, second by second. I’m watching chips fall off the cliff wall, waiting for the house itself to slide into the water, and leave no trace behind.
         “Sure, fine,” she says, slightly confused. Twisting on the bed, she looks at you sideways, says, “Is everything okay? Are you really all right?”
         You look away, sharply, involuntarily. Your lips twist in a grimace, like you’re trying to keep something uncomfortable inside. A bone shifting, organs rebelling. That’s what would do you in, eventually. A revolt from the body itself. They wanted freedom without knowing what it meant.
         “I . . .” you say, and stop.
         “What happened?” she asks, insistent and curious, not trying to pry but drawn in by the inherent drama of the situation. There’s concern present but it’s masked by the overwhelming desire to find out something before everyone else, to have the facts before the newsletter is released. The thirst for knowledge not found in a textbook. Everything she says is suspect, in that context. But I think she means it, what she says. She does care. But that doesn’t mean I ever had to like it, or her.
         You’re turning even further away, as if you know I’m there and are trying not to face me. But it’s pain and you’re trying to compress yourself as small as possible to present the least surface to it. It’s the air, the stinging air of this town.
         “I told him to go,” you say, finally. I watch your throat pulse, desperate to swallow and take it into yourself. I’m reading too much into it, I’m too far removed.
         “Who. You told who to . . .” her eyes widen then. “Oh my God,” she says, breathless. She puts a hand up to her mouth, preventing herself from speaking, holding the action just long enoguh for it to register, soap opera theatrics. We learn what we’re told. I can’t judge. I was here once, and I was no different. “Are you saying, what are you saying?” She’s thrown off, these seismic shifts weren’t too common among our group, there were flings and there were relationships and one didn’t cross over into the other. Short term and long term. Both types were doomed to ending, but it was still a surprise when it happened, like a rocket coming out of nowhere, decimating your house. You look up to the sky and wonder but the whole time it was right there, in the silo next door and noises that you heard at odd times. We either never know what to look for, or when we do know we refuse to see because it’s not how we want it to happen. Some things are inevitable but admitting that feels akin to dying. Because that’s the biggest inevitability. So I’m told. So they say.
         “It’s over,” I think you whisper but maybe not. Maybe the soaked in drama of the story demands that something be said. I can’t remember it, because I wasn’t here. I’m listening to the end of the telephone conservation I couldn’t tap. I wasn’t here, and this is how it went. I know what day this is and yet I don’t. Not for certain. But the time feels right. The seasons gesture and confirm. Am I drawn to myself, your thoughts of me? This is barely a stable point. I never said that. Aren’t you coming to get me yet, to reach out and take me from here? Where are the hands that can give me relief?
         She looks at you for a bit, still trying to process this. You make no motion, or a further response. Without another word she leans over and wraps you in her arms, easily engulfing you, resting her head on your shoulder, the easy contact that girls have. You close your eyes, lost in this for a few seconds and I see you exhale, your body seeming to expand. A shudder ripples through you, a cough waiting to occur.
         “What happened?” she asks again, but differently, not from surprise but because she’s trying to gently pull the facts out of you, out of a place where they’ll fester or grow a shell around them and press against the inside of you like a hard tumor. You to purge me, as best you can, before you can move on, no matter how much it scrapes up the interior. “What did he do?”
         “Nothing, he didn’t do anything,” you say, pulling your arms closer to yourself, trying to protect from a punch that you’re still waiting to come. “It wasn’t him, it was me, I couldn’t . . .”
         “No,” she says, simply. She hugs you a little tighter. “Stop that, don’t think like that. It wasn’t you, not all of it. I don’t want to hear you talk like that.”
         “I made the decision,” you state, and that was more or less how it went, my hazy memories can confirm. I remember a stunned silence and the feeling that a vital part of me had just fallen down a long hole, without any hope of ever retrieving it. Exaggerated, but that’s how we felt back then. Everything was epic. I remember trying to make myself numb but when something is missing, is torn away, you know it’s gone. “I stood there and I said it was over-“
         ”Only because he forced your hand,” she tells you. “Only because he was going to let it go on the way it was. He didn’t care that you were unhappy.” That wasn’t it. I did care. But I thought that things might get better, if they were stretched out long enough. I thought things might settle down. But I was wrong and instead it dragged out for far longer than it had to. And you were hurt because of that and I didn’t have the words for proper apologies. But I’m not the bad guy. We were both clueless, we knew something was wrong and something wasn’t working right and we didn’t know how to fix it and we didn’t know how to make it stop. So we shattered and broke apart. “This didn’t come out of nowhere. You know that. Tell me you know that. It’s been building for a while.” She knows so much. How much did you tell her? The things between us were always kept between us but that’s not always the case. I was never told about any of this and yet here I am, hearing the other side of the argument, with my spirit deadened, with all solidity gone. Outside the sky is grey, like the aftermath of something angry. You’ve got one light on in your room and it barely lights the place at all.
         “It has been,” you say, eventually, and it’s like she’s extracted something painful. In a certain light I can see it, jagged and bloody. There’s no place for it to fit, so it had to go. I can’t pinpoint the moment it started to dissolve, the glue between us. “But he did care, don’t say he didn’t.”
         “How can you say that, when he knew you were growing apart, that things weren’t the same way anymore.” She still has you, but she’s pulled away slightly, giving you some space to breathe. You shift under the sudden release, trying to find new heat. “That night at the restaurant, when you ran out upset and he didn’t even come after you. He just let you go.” No. No. I thought you were upset for a reason that wasn’t the actual reason. I thought it was something silly and not worth escalating what was becoming a mounting series of nested dramas, one leading into another almost without a pause. I couldn’t deal with that, with everything being blown up into a grand scale. In the end, I made the wrong decision, but it was too late anyway and it probably didn’t matter. I tell myself that, sitting invisibly in your room, consisting of little more than the specter of my own willpower.
         “He was afraid, he didn’t know what to do,” you insist, defending the man who broke your heart. For months afterward your father would try to murder me with his eyes. By the time I left his handshake wasn’t too crushing. “He knew something was going on but he didn’t know which way to jump. He was afraid of doing the wrong thing.”
         “And he did anyway,” she says, frowning.
         “Yeah, he did,” you admit, moving your arms so that they frame your face in a rigid rectangle. “But so did I. And I can’t blame him for thinking it might work out. It just . . .” your breathing comes a bit heavier, you close your eyes again. “It couldn’t. It didn’t.”
         “It’s all right,” she says again, softly, rubbing your arm gently, the sleeve bunching up and wrinkling at her touch. “You did the right thing. You know you did.”
         “I do,” you say, and almost make it a question. “But it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like we didn’t try hard enough.”
         “Don’t do this to yourself,” she orders. “Come on, don’t. You have enough to worry about, without beating yourself up over this.”
         “He looked like I hit him,” you say, as if answering another question, from a hidden member of the audience. “Like I punched him right in the face.”
         “What did he say?” she asks, a little too eager to know the exact construction of my pain.
         “He didn’t say anything,” you moan, you face becoming briefly pinched. “That was even worse. He just stood there, and he didn’t move.”
         “Was he here?” she inquires suddenly, her eyes darting around, looking for me, to see if had someone crawled outside the door, or was waiting at the window, desperately searching for someone to show their face. But I’m right here. Out of step with time.
         “No, he wasn’t, he . . . we had the conversation, it was on the way home from school. We hadn’t walked together in a while and so we met up and we were walking and . . .” one of your legs twitches a little, a spasm of recollection, “it was fine, things were fine. But I kept, I was flinching too often, like I was waiting for a fight to happen and it wasn’t but I . . . I told myself I didn’t want to live like that, just waiting so I could crawl out of the next argument.” You sigh, some part of you passing away. When you die you’ll make a noise just like that, before your body lets you go. “I realized, there was something about the two of us that . . . it just didn’t work and neither of us would ever be able to figure out what it was. We could talk and laugh and hold hands . . . but the thing that didn’t click, it never would, and we’d never be able to overcome it.”
         “This must have been a long walk,” your friend says, squeezing your shoulder.
         You laugh a little, sadly. “We were taking our time. Or trying to.” What small smile there was fades from your face, as memory infests and invades. “Once, just once, we talked about, you know, what it would be like years from now, if we were married and had kids . . . you know, the stupid stuff that couples talk about.” I think I was joking that day. Dammit. On any level I could bear, I told myself that. “And I thought about that . . . and I couldn’t see it. Once, maybe, I could but . . . I saw it happening but not working and it . . . that wasn’t what I wanted. For either of us. And pretending otherwise, it was, I was lying to myself.”
         I think your friend is about to say something but you keep talking, reducing whatever she was going to say to a gesture of reassurance, a blind swipe of body language. “So I . . . I told him that. He wasn’t expecting it, it threw him off balance. I said, I told him that things had changed between us, that it wasn’t working out anymore, that it wasn’t worth going through all the periods of fighting just to get to the periods where we weren’t fighting, that those times weren’t good enough anymore. It wasn’t something I looked forward to, the way I used to.”
         “Ouch,” she says, barely pronouncing the word.
         “I know, I know,” you reply, apologizing to the one person who can’t hear. “I didn’t mean to say all that, I didn’t want to say anything but I thought, the walk was going so well, things were going well but . . .” you shift on the bed, sitting up a little, so that your back is up against the pillow. “Eventually they wouldn’t be and next time we’d break up and . . . it wouldn’t be pretty, it’d be bitter and we’d never speak to each other again. I didn’t want that to happen, I didn’t,” you insist, throwing your case before the jury, the masked judges, hoping for some kind of response. But your friend only watches as the breakdown is detailed, as the outline of the final disintegration is traced. What ate the foundation, we’ll never know, but we can sketch how the whole structure fell. We can chart the exquisite poetry of its collapse, the twisting arms of its debris as it tumbled down, the gentle rumble as it settled into shapeless dust, the inwardly wrought destruction as gravity took control of what we never could and put the final stake through the affair, something we never had the heart to do ourselves. “So I wanted to do it then, while things were okay, while we could break up and recover and be friends again.”
         “It never happens,” she might mutter, spitting out personal experience. Or maybe she says nothing. It could just the wind, rattling past your window, trying to tug me into separate pieces. “It just doesn’t.”
         “It’s what I wanted,” you state firmly, like that made any kind of difference. I wanted you to not break up with me and that happened anyway. This life doesn’t work that way. I’m sure you didn’t want to die before you reached thirty. I wanted not to see it, not to start the avalanche of my own dissolution. “I told him that too, not in that way. I did the best I could, but I didn’t explain very well.” Another muffled apology, cloaked in regret.
         “And what did he do?”
          “He said, what are you trying to tell me . . .” you do a good impersonation of how I talk, you get the headlong rush of syllables just right, the way I sometimes pause in all the wrong places, just for effect, just to see if you’re paying attention. “I thought about dancing around it, I almost gave up right then, promised myself I do this another day.” Your hand closes into a fist, pounds lightly at the edge of the bed, hardly enough to make any kind of dent. “But he deserved honesty, we both did. So I told him.” You make it sound so simple, when you say it like that. “I said we needed to end this, before we hate each other. We had to do it now, before it was too late.
         “And he said, so you’re telling me, we should break up. That we’re done.
         “I told him, yes, that’s what I meant.
         “And he said, ah. That’s all he said at first.” You shiver. “It was so weird, I was looking for some kind of reaction, I wanted to him to scream or breakdown or . . . but he just, he froze up and became this black hole and . . . nothing escaped. Not a single response. He stared at me for a long time and I wanted to hug him, just to, to hold him together, I was afraid he might spin apart.
         “And after a while, he said, so that’s it, then. That’s all. It’s over. He said it so quietly, like he was afraid if he said it too loud it might come true, that there was some last chance it might not be real.” Your voice has been numb the whole time, a steady recital, preserving the inflections of our voices but without any emotion breaking through. Leave that to us. It’s not for your friend to know how we felt. That’s something, as terrible as it is, that only the two of us will share, until the end of time. The good, and the bad. And how it ended.
         “I said, I’m sorry, it’s over. I said I’m sorry again. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there. I wanted him to say something but I was afraid of asking him to because I didn’t know what he would say. And I couldn’t bear it, him standing there like that. I had to go. I couldn’t stay. So I, ah, I squeezed his hand, real quick, just to let him know I was there because I wasn’t sure if he even realized it.
         “And I walked away. I had no choice. I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t.” You spasm a little bit, trying to convince the elusive set of judges still. Your friend whispers that you’re right, that you had no choice. She says nothing more. The story fills the room, leaves no space for anything else. It’s our lives, deflating.
         “I left him on the corner, just standing there. He didn’t move. When I was a block away, I looked back. I told myself I wouldn’t and I did anyway. And he was still there, like time had stopped around him and I had escaped and he couldn’t go on. But I kept walking because I didn’t want to go back. And I promised I wouldn’t look back again, but I did anyway, after another block. And he was gone. Like he was never there. Just gone. Like none of it had ever happened. Just some kind of weird dream. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel real.”
         Where did I go? I did stand there for a long time, watching you go. Watching you and not seeing you. A dull ache, a numbed realization, the way a bone is pulled through your skin, yanked right through a slit. I stood there and thought of all the things I had done, that I had meant to do, and all the pathways that had brought us to that moment. I tried to think of something I could have done differently that would have changed the outcome, so that the day wouldn’t have ended with you walking away. I didn’t see you look back, either time. I assume you did. I couldn’t see. There was something in the way. I watched you go, I saw you get smaller and smaller, receding down the block and when you were a speck blending into the distance, when you were so far away that you seemed a static object, something that had faded into the background, that’s when I turned and left. Perhaps, right up to that last second, I thought you might turn back and tell me what a joke it had been, making me think we were done. But it wasn’t a joke, which was fine, because it wasn’t funny. When I did move, it was more survival instinct than anything else. But you never heard that part of the story. And I never heard this.
         “That’s . . . wow,” she says, possessed by an adjacent shock. “That took a lot of guts, it did.” She pauses, stares at you as if looking at something new, then adds, “I’m proud of you. I really am.”
         “Why,” you say, warily. “Because I wounded a friend? I’m not so thrilled about that.”
         “No, dammit, no,” she says, forcefully, looking for a second like she might grab you and shake you. I’m fairly certain she never liked me. I don’t know why it matters to me, to find out one way or another. Perhaps I’ll ask her point blank next time I see her. I want to be sure of at least one thing, before this time runs out. “Stop thinking like that. You realized something was wrong and you . . . you stood up and admitted it and then did what you could to fix it. There’s nothing wrong with that, there’s no shame.”
         You look away, lean toward your nightstand, your hand bracing your weight on the top of it. “I feel like I stabbed him in the face.” You say it with a muted viciousness that I never thought you were capable of, imbuing the words with the very sense that have imagined such a thing at least once, in your darkest moments. I stabbed a man in the face once and he took ten minutes to die and he screamed the entire time. And he kept trying to breathe around the knife and it made this hideous whistling noise, like sewage being pushed through a ragged filter. And the sound kept going after he had stopped screaming, until he was finally dead. I’d rather shoot someone, given the choice. If murder has to be part of my day, I’d rather not have it seared into my memory like that. Sometimes the wind sounds just like that whistle, when it blows across the right surface. I can’t keep these thoughts out of my head, there’s no barrier preventing them. “I keep wanting to call him, to see if he’s all right. To make sure he didn’t go and do something stupid.”
         “Don’t do it,” she cautions, with probably more fervor than she intends. “If you start talking to him now, while you’re upset, you’ll . . .” she stops, not sure if saying the words might bring about some kind of curse.
         “What? I’ll go back to him?” you ask acidly, running your fingers along the handset of the phone. “That’s not going to happen,” you add, a second later, with a forlorn sigh. “I know it isn’t, even if I wanted to, I don’t think he’d want to do it.”
         I would have. But the same thing would have only happened again. We both know that. Once you’ve locked into the pattern, there’s no breaking out of the borders. It leads to the same place, no matter how many times you trace the path.
         “I don’t know about that,” she says and it might be the truest statement she’s uttered yet. “Men can be pretty stubborn about these things. If he thinks he still has a chance, he’d go for it, I think. He would.” She moves a few inches away from you, to give you space, and crosses her arms over her chest. “So don’t call him. I’m serious. You won’t be doing yourself any favors.”
         You give her a sly smile then, that looks more like you than anything else in this world. “What if I told you I already did? Right after I got off the phone with you? What would you say then?”
         Her eyes widen, and she’s clearly not sure how to respond.
         But the smile goes a moment later and you let go of your grip on the phone. “Don’t worry, Jesus, you look like you’re about to freak out.”
         “No, not yet,” she says slowly. “But you haven’t finished, I’m sure.”
         You shake your head. “There’s nothing else. I did call his house, but nobody was home.” A pensive expression colors your face. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he went.” I can tell you. I did go back home, but I took the long way. I tried to get myself lost, I made random turns, I went ways that I didn’t think I knew, trying to find a path that would take me to a place that I might forget. But it was impossible. I knew the town too well, all its streets, laid out in their perfect grid, each block a near mirror of the one before, stamped with the same personality. I couldn’t get lost in the maze because I knew every exit, the walls weren’t just glass, they were membranes and I could step through at any moment. Outside a house, a lady asked me if everything was okay. I used to walk by her in the morning, on the way to school. I don’t know what she saw in my stance. I told her it was a wonderful day, and kept walking. Maybe she called my name, she saw something more in my face. I didn’t stop. Maybe I didn’t hear her at all. Maybe she never said anything. Eventually I made it home, after you had called. The air had felt weird, the lingering vibrations of the ringing from your attempt to reach out. I never knew, until now, until this day that’s passed so long ago. I sat down on the couch and I think it hit me then that it was over, that things would never be the way they were before. Time struck me then, the impermeability of it. How once you passed through something it was altered and nothing you could do would ever bring it back. I knew that already but I never believed it. I thought again how we got to that point, all the things we had done together, the moments we had. I tried to think of what I had done to bring us to this, what I could have done to avoid it. And I realized it then, and it nearly paralyzed me. There was nothing I would have done differently. And there was no way to stop what had happened. As much as anything in this world was, it was inevitable. As much as the bad times had led us to this, so had the good times, they were what had kept us going long enough to get to that point, where we couldn’t sustain it any longer. There was no way to dodge the train, once it had started. It was rolling sideways down the hill and the best you could do was decide at what point you wanted it to run you down, at the top or the bottom. We waited and we strained and it came anyway, it bore down on us regardless. It wasn’t a notion I could easily bear. I think I tried to watch some television, but the only thing on was soap operas. I sat there until my parents came home and I promised myself I wouldn’t tell them for a few days, until I knew for sure what this was all about. I told them that night, when I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Because I knew, that it was done. I knew it was over and there was nothing I could have done about it and even if there had been, I didn’t know if I could have changed enough to keep it from turning out the way it did.
         “He’ll be all right,” she says, with a callous glee. “Guys are used to this kind of thing. They bounce back. He’ll go hang out with some friends and he’ll be fine. They’ll sit around and talk about how much women suck and pretend that you’ve made a horrible mistake.”
         “Maybe,” you say, laughing a little. “I think I’d be okay with that, but . . . I don’t know.” You bite your lip and fix your shirt, working out the wrinkles. “The one thing that was stopping me, that kept me from doing this was . . . I didn’t know how he was going to react.” You tilt your head, stare at your friend in a puzzled fashion.
         “Who cares?” she says. I think she’s trying to make you feel better, I think that’s her plan, to push you some distance away from this mess, to focus your mind on other matters. “He’s not your problem anymore. Let his friends pick up the wreckage.”
         “Did you really dislike him that much?” you ask, finally catching the thread. She doesn’t answer, of course, even though I would very much like to know. “It’s, you don’t understand, I’ve known him, we’ve known each other since we were little . . .” you draw into yourself again, trying to limit your exposure to the world. “He’s like my best friend and I didn’t want to do this to him and I had no choice and . . . I think I know him well. I thought I did. And I had no idea how he was going to take this, or what he would do.” Everything you say applies to me. Sometimes in my dreams I would think about us breaking up and every time the dream would stop right before the aftermath. Even my mind didn’t know, until it was time. A shudder passes through me and I feel the floor rising up, I’m halfway in its clutches. It’s so cold in here, even without temperature. “And I’m just afraid that . . . that he’ll snap and never talk to me again. And we won’t even be friends anymore, like we never met.” That’ll never happen. I strain but my lips can’t make the words. You’re in me, like a growth I can’t remove.
         “You’d be better off, if he was going to be like that,” she says, bluntly. I know why she was your friend, I really do. She told it to you in a way nobody else would, an honesty you couldn’t bear to hear. Everyone else thought you were fragile and handled you like something already cracked. She treated you like you would bounce if dropped and if you did start to shatter, she’d be first in line to put you back together. Alone and all night, if necessary. “You did what was best. If he can’t handle that, then that’s his problem.”
         “That’s not good enough,” you say, arguing a point no one can get around. Your words are static in my brain, buzzing like demented bugs. I’m not here. It hurts to stay. “That’s not how I wanted it to end.”
         “It’ll work itself out. You’ll see,” she says, with sudden kindness. “You won’t lose him, not completely.”
         “But I don’t know,” you counter. “I don’t know that for sure.”
         “You know, then it’s his goddamn loss,” she snaps and the bed bounces slightly with her anger. It drives me sideways, discorporates me until my thoughts are barely tangible. “If he wants to be an asshole like that, it’s his loss. You know that.”
         “Yeah,” you say, quietly acquiescing in the face of it. “I guess.” Nothing in your voice or body suggests that you’re not at all convinced. In school, we didn’t speak at first, too awkward to know what to say, trying to look at the each other without the other person noticing, fleeting glances in the hallways, trying to hear other conversations while pretending to be resolutely deaf and unconcerned. The first step was a note stuffed in a locker, in handwriting that belonged to neither of us, saying where do you go from here? I think I made somebody write it, because I was desperate, because I couldn’t do it any longer. I think I put one in my own, to force me to ask the question that I refused to face.
         A chill wind runs through me. The scene before me is frozen, your face caught like that, worried and wondering. I try to hold it, to bury it tight in my memory, the way I was always taught, but the wind grabs me then, the weather in your house loosens whatever hold I have and I’m taken, I drift away, too swift to stop myself, the cold making me too numb to even care. I’ve got it all somewhere, I promise myself that. But I can’t reach it and I wonder what kind of lie I would tell myself, if it came down to it, if I had no other choice at all. Driven away, I can’t tell, and it’s no comfort at all.