15 - Her

I see her through the scope. She is sitting or looks like she is sitting, a wall is in the way obscuring her lower half, it’s always a wall. There is something about her pose, her position that makes me think she is petting a cat or something, but if she was she would have straightened up by now.

She is smiling. I don’t think I have seen her before but a part of me, well, anyway.

Who can be happy? I pack my shit. It’s so much to carry now you wouldn’t believe. I do. I take bearings, count obstacles, place perspective on what will likely become a maze when I descend the ten flights of stair that brought me here, above the ruin of all of our lives. I leave the roof like heaven, without the wings or the sword. Below, the street feels subterranean, and though it is not, it feels full of people as well, strangers, the ghosts of people, but I am the only one here. I am lost immediately. He left me the guns. Why did he leave me the guns?

Below I pass of all things an old ice cream cart.  I think. I am hearing everything now, hearing how it used to be. I know it is not real and yet, around this corner, behind that sign, life resumes, a person gets out of their car and disappears through a glass door. A radio in a car and a woman driving it pass me uninterested. Would they care now? Would they speak to me if I was thrown back there like a prophet, bringing doom. There is no one here. There is no car, no food to be had beyond what I carry and what I have not found yet, already on its way to dirt. There is no one but me and the world my mind still tries to hold onto within me, impossibly, is too real for me to ever leave for good.

I lower myself against and slide down a wall again, the one I have said is the wall now, the last wall between us, too scared to look around it, my plan still unformed, my hope so fragile it remains unborn and I cannot make those last steps in this storm of voices, encouragements, doubts. I have always wrangled with belief, I don’t anymore. I stay sitting. I build a fire. I know how to do this, I make cakes.

I guess she follows the impossible smell to me. Anyone would. I have let not knowing how to say hello stop me from trying. “Are those pancakes?” she asks me. I think too long about how to answer.

“Are you real?” she now asks. I nod to her not meeting a gaze that for some reason will carry all of the pain left in the world. I tell her that I do not have any syrup. I imagine her taking one cake after another from me, me placing them in her hand, her smiling, happy to have anything. Me smiling for the same reason. She asks me if I lost somebody.

I tell her there is nothing wrong. I tell her she doesn’t have to look at me. Still the tears come. At some point she has sat down and at another point I have begun handing her cakes at the end of the spatula. I see my hands for real now. I think they are real because she is here. I imagine the smiling and the laughter and for some reason grass and a yellow sun and though these things do not happen, cannot happen, it does not make this bad.

She tells me that she lost someone too.