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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U11t9lFZtSE

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Unable to share their company

In person, they’d met instead

In fiction, and confided

In one another

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             As though dividing

             Into two equal halves

             The portions that comprised

              A dream.

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             Why him, and why her?

             Neither could really say.

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                        I

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For this was a dream - you could tell

Because the circular motions of the world

Had stilled, and because

The sunset - brilliant, in all its shades

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Of scarlet,

Orange - held itself in perpetuity

Between the vantage of their view

And the closure that would have been

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    It settling behind the horizon.

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                        II

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The wind moved, but the trees didn’t.

The lights glimmered, but never faded.

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And it was there she sat, waiting

Upon a park-bench, over a cliff

That pointed diligently

Towards a sun that would never set -  

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Suspended, in its capture

Over the oceans to the west.
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“Do you mind?”

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He appeared suddenly, behind her, breaking a momentary trance. Her eyes had glossed over and his sudden appearance made her blink. Annoying. Moisture flitted back into her eyes and she broke their contact with the setting sun.

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He looked dumb. Slim. But with all these layers of flannel and plaid so as to lend bulk to a frame that wasn’t there.   

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            “It’s pretty, and there’s nowhere else to sit.”

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He was looking at an empty space opposite her, on the bench, and was motioning as if he wanted to take it.

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F*****g, invasion of privacy, she thought. But it was a public park and I guess he could do what he wanted.

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            “I don’t really feel like chatting, but sure.”

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He nodded, and his eyes focused away from her for a second - almost like he was a robot, and he had to do some quick calculations to decide what ‘chatting’ meant.

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            “Fair enough, thanks.”

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He sat down and tried not to look at her, while she settled back into place and waited for her eyes to return to their inertia.

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She had dark hair, curly, like she’d teased it in the mornings, and she was tiny. Spit and vinegar, she sat with a kind of fixed anticipation, an energy, housed in a posture that was working as hard as it could to remain still.

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He looked at the sunset, the one that wasn’t moving. He found it eerie, dangerous, almost like a flower that bloomed from poisonous plants. It was hypnotic, because to look at it was to naturally incline into the idea that it might set at any moment, and as though its setting might somehow symbolize an answer to an impossible question.

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            Why was she here? He thought. It’s such a deadly spot to get caught in.

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He knew what the sunset meant, because he recognized it.

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He’d stared at it before, and understood that things like it always carried some kind of exchange. You’d think it was just a pretty view, but it took something from you and he had the aching suspicion that, in this case, it wouldn’t be a fair transaction.

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But who the f**k was he and why the f**k was he even there?

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She was trying, really trying, to get back to the feeling she’d had before he’d sat down. But his presence disturbed it all - threw the emperor off her groove.

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She tossed him a glance, sizing him up.

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He wasn’t as slim as she thought, his features had changed. He had a dorky mustache, a thick one, with a patch of grass under his bottom lip. He had thick-rimmed eyeglasses, and surprisingly nice eyebrows. She looked closer at them - in a subtle, sideways kind of way. They were perfect, which pissed her off because most women had to tweeze theirs. She looked closer.

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No. They weren’t perfect. They had faded, white-little scars all throughout them - deep, in some places, like the kinds you get after being hit by something.  

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He’d noticed she was studying him and turned towards her, a little.

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She turned abruptly back.

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He smiled. But decided not to say anything.

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She was mad - mad that he was there, mad that he’d taken half of this moment, mad because the sun would never set now that he was looking at it too.

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F**k it.

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            “Do you think photographs last forever?”

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She figured she might as well break the silence. It’d be awkward if she didn’t, and she was pretty sure he’d just sit there indefinitely if she couldn’t find a reason to make him go away.

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            “What do you mean?” He returned.

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“Do you think that when you take a picture of something, that it lasts longer? And that if it’s a good enough picture, it never really goes away?”

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            “Like paintings?”

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Dude.

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            “Like pictures.”

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She was impatient, and he was annoying. Her tone had started to contort itself into that frustrated tenor that spelled f**k off into a sentence without actually saying it.

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“I’m not sure.” He answered. And then did that strange, calculating thing where his eyes trailed off for a moment - like they were looking at something that wasn’t exactly in his field of view.

“When I was a kid, my father told me that I could take photographs with my mind, if I practiced hard enough.”

“That if I paid close enough attention to the details, let them kind of develop in my head, that they’d stay there for as long as I needed them to.”

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She listened.

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“I still remember that moment - we were near a school, with snow, and we were watching my friends run around a playground.” 

His eyes trailed off again.

“I focused on the bikes, and the color, and the slope of where we were standing, and I can still pull that memory out despite how long it’s been.”

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They let that new information breathe for a second and, in a kind of synchronized way, wondered after it as they stared at the sunset together.

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            “Does it ever move?” She asked, “the memory?”

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            “No.” He answered.

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Though the lighting hadn’t changed, she was almost certain that the sun had lowered a little.

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It was hard to tell, the eyes could play tricks when staring at things that were immobile - the mind wants pattern, and so invents them when there aren’t any there.

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She squinted. And he decided to pick up where he left off.

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“Sometimes, I remember things that haven’t happened, or before they happen. They feel like ghost memories, or dreams, but I’m not really sure where they come from.”

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He stopped for a second.

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“There are similarities in the pictures, but subtle differences that stand out. And I can never really shake the feeling that it wasn’t me that’d taken them.”

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She looked closer at the sunset. It had definitely shrunk.

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            “Have you ever had your heart-broken?” She asked.

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He looked at her. The sudden change of subject surprised him and he couldn’t tell if she’d been ignoring him, or if there was a connection between the two trains of thought that he couldn’t see yet.

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            “Yes.” He answered.

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            “What did it feel like?”

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His eyes trailed off again.

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“Like a small hole opened up in my chest - a sucking one, like a vacuum - and that it was pulling towards a person who was never going to come back, and that would never close until she did.”

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She felt affirmed, that’s exactly what it felt like.

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            “This person had a hole too, I think, a deeper one.”

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            “It was me that asked her to go.”

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She was dumbfounded by that.

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            “Why?”

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            “Because we were young, and stuck, and I had just gotten really hurt.”

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“I looked long into our future together and didn’t like what was there. It killed us both, in a lot of ways, and I thought the holes in our chests might be worth sparing us that eventuality.”

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            “Did they?”

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He tucked his chin - his eyes kind of sunk back into his head and his voice dropped an octave.

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            “I don’t know.”

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He looked at the sunset. It hadn’t moved.

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            “Did the hole ever close?” She asked him.

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            “Yes, but it never disappears.”

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She looked closer at the sunset, and he looked closer at her.

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            “The picture doesn’t move,” he reminded her.

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            “F**k off.” She responded - as though they hadn’t just shared a moment.

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            “You want it to move, because it’s a memory.”

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            “You want it to be real, to be back there, for the sun to set.”

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            “Because there’s a hole in your chest that you think it could fill.”

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            “But it can’t, because the hole never disappears.”

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            “And it only closes when you leave it alone.”

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She kept staring, even though she knew he was right. He’d been where she was, she could tell. His stories had a kind of pain to them, and she had a feeling that his chest was filled with holes that never really closed.

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Like his eyebrows, faded and white, with some cut deeper than others - she pictured his chest and could see little lights shining through all of the gaps.

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“The sun only sets when you stop looking at it.”

            “And the pain only lasts for as long as you feed it.”

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She closed her eyes, tight, and pictured all those little wounds. They twinkled in a kind of friendly way, but represented hurts that were hard for her to fathom.

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There were many, and they poked swish cheese through a chest of drawers.

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As she pictured them, she saw the lights start to dwindle and they made little popping sounds as they slowly began to shut. They looked painful, raw, and she imagined each one burning a little as they sealed.

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Unbeknownst to her, the boy had disappeared while she sat like that and the sun had finally finished setting.  

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        The park bench faded with the lights, and the dream came to a close.

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