What you wonder the most, though, is not why they don’t care but why you do. Why you allow yourself to drift away while reading and think of the shape of their eyelashes, one by one; why when you’re trying to get away their face appears like Christmas lights with a big bright sign and an empty car and a road map. They don’t care, but it’s easy not to care, you think, it’s easy to forget, until you have to, and then there is nothing harder in the world. But that’s all there is anyway. Meeting and growing and building and breaking and, finally, forgetting. Until every experience is a fold in a piece of paper tacked away somewhere on a bulletin board at the back of your head, and you see their picture and think, oh, yes, some time, some place, they were me, and I them, and my entire universe existed only because of each breath they took and each word they laughed over the telephone with a gravelly voice that sleep half took over. Oh, yes, you think, in another world on another planet we are both dead, or partly, because there is a place where scars can kill and this scar certainly never healed, though it hid into the deep recesses of folded skin and was forgotten. They don’t care now but one day neither will you, one day none of this will matter except for the passing story, do you remember that time…? And your friends will say, with so-and-so? And we were on the porch and we saw what we thought was a shooting star but it moved so fast and burned so bright that in the end we almost lost ourselves, too? And you’ll say, yes, yes, that was it, it was then, and their name will be on the tip of your tongue but you will not be able to reach it.
