We’re different ends of a watch spring. Where she coils tighter with actions and purpose, I grow slack to yield tension. I tick away and she tocks towards, holding taut equilibrium in the void. Calculated to equalise flaws, wound precisely together, we are honed to count on each other. It’s a wonderful way to spend time and oddly efficient, flying fast in the way of these things. No matter how much has passed it always feels fuller, flowing with the potential of a bottomless hourglass. We go on this way forever, forging past and future while enjoying our present.
I find her reading palms by the light of a thousand paper candles. ‘Give me your past,’ she says, ‘and I will offer you a future.’ I take my place among the silk and linen trappings that furnish the floor. Her eyes absorb all that is about us yet hold no reflection nor judgement. I lay out my life in fitful spurts of recollection and scaled memory. She listens in patience and stillness while a warm autumn breeze licks at the canvas tenting. When I am done she smiles and says, ‘There now, you have years ahead for lightness.’
Standing by the cliff, she says, ‘I want you to push me first and then dive in after to save me.’ I don’t ask why and she laughs and the harness tightens. ‘Are you scared?’ Only of losing you, I say. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘after this you’ll have only lost fear.’ I can almost see her skin eating the sunlight, caramel clashing and consuming the blue. She turns to face the cliff and the future and says, ‘Now fucking push me.’ I put my hands to the small of her back and whisper in her ear, I love…
That was the moment I loved him the most I ever would. Drenched in his own sugary cynicism, with just enough smile eroding the sneer to make him seem beautiful. Things would get difficult later and I knew it, but the future was something that happened in Blade Runner and I didn’t much care to see it. All the times I’d ever need fed into each other like film moving through a pinhole camera. I would have loved myself back then if I could’ve been me now. And him, if I saw him, I’d know there was no future.
A Few Short Words 