.ten.
i have a black and white photo of him oblivious on a still playground swing. he had walked away from us, either to explore or to take in something that we could not see for ourselves. he didn't know i had pointed the camera at him, adjusted the lense, smiled at the click of the shutter. i had wanted to be swimming around in his thoughts right then, watching through his pupils, to know if they were swallowing in the trees, or the emptying parking lot, or the sounds of the young girls' hearts swelling. maybe he would have let me stay there and make a home in his memory.
then, i was sitting in the center of a bare theater. he was the show. the middle of the universe, and i saw starlets taking turns in his orbit. gravity would not hold them long. sometimes, i would shout, and he would look out into the darkness, at the outline of my body, i could not read his eyes before he turned back again. my words were always so jumbled up. like a pile of clothes tangled at the floor of a messy closet. if you took them out and layed them on the bed, they would be something between "please love me," and "we will be fine if we stay quiet," and "who are you now?"
i wrote about our fractures so many times, the paper began to hate me with the memorizations. when a person is sick, their body rises to a high temperature in an attempt to kill the germs. perhaps that is not a good comparison, but that is why he came out in my stories. that is why my stomach would get anxious and why my head would swirl. that is why he was the faceless subject of summer nights and caution under blankets. i'm getting braver, or older and indifferent, and i can tell you these things. they don't seem like they belong to me anymore.
in my imagination, or in the ether of us all, he hates the person i've become. i walled myself up because of people like him and people that weren't like him, and i left my life behind twice. sometimes, hindsight is our greatest of knowledge, and i didn't understand until we were over, and not the sort of over that is used to describe break-ups or break-downs. this over snuck up on us. it crawled through our windows dressed in black, raping our confidence and murdering our breath.
we kept it from the newspapers and the television stations. we turned away the reporters at our doors and exited our homes with coats over our heads. we were very good pretenders, back then.
no one knows the ending.