Forget.

I am walking next to the water and when I look to the side I can see the reflection of everything around me but somehow upside down and colored differently. They aren't negatives - it isn't a picture that I am looking at, but the colors are different and that somehow makes it more real to me, it makes it seem as if the world behind that sloughing sheet is better than this one. Even me, even us, we shed skins and the new us that arrives with eyes closed is more perfect and more beautiful and more meaningful that the us that stepped out of the shower last night. The morning bakes and hardens our spirits until all we shed anymore is red clay in our footsteps - you can see the hard, flinty centers of our eyes when we laugh these days, and laughter means less and weighs less than ever. This is the future and we are choking on it.

I try to remember her face and I remember the eyes first, always the eyes first. They are luminous and a color in between blue and grey, and when she looked at me I thought for a moment that storm was coming inside of her, and I was always right. It never mattered what we said or did, the storm always came and soaked both of us to the core. I never loved her but I said I did, I said it because I knew she needed to hear it, and I have not regretted doing so, not even now when I can barely remember her startling blonde hair, that shock of frozen lightning that wavered over her eyes when she looked from behind a cascading waterfall of light. I can't remember anything else about her, not her taste or the shape of her lips, or the curve of her back, but I can always remember her eyes and they mean something to me, I just don't remember what.

There is a stone shelf at the end of the canal and I sit on it with a cigarette and a homeless man digging through a trash can near me on the street corner. I watch him and he watches me, both of us suspicious, both of us hungry for something and then I turn back to the canal. The water is rising from the runoff, and with the water comes litter in all shapes and sizes. There are milk cartons like paper icebergs, bobbing up and down in the water. I watch a crab maneuver between two soda bottles, plastic the easiest way for us to assert that humanity matters in some way to all of us. I flick the cigarette into the water and it is gone before the smoke rises far enough into the sky for me to lose sight of it. The homeless man sits on the stone shelf near me and eats from an opened styrofoam container. We throw away life, we are so fucking rich that we throw life into the trash can for others to find, and I am okay with that. I am okay with that! I almost want to cry for us, for all of us, but I don't - it would disrespect the choices made by those before us, soldiers wearing fatalistic grey and singing songs in monotones.

Tomorrow the sun will rise high enough for me to watch it burn the clouds, and nothing will change except I will still not be in love with anything but myself, and you will be in love with me and that is everything. Corn will still taste like corn, and water will still drench our spirits in stalls, and mercury still coats us in fascinating colors when we cough. But I am not in love. I am not in love.

-Rich

something this way fell apart