Watching Yourself Go By

Waking

Frosted leaves tap wetly at the window. Snow moved at a rapid, bloated pace, coating the pavement below. The city wept in that stunned, apathetic way it does on a stark winter afternoon.

Inside, Giordi paced. It was time; she needed transformation, and she needed it now. "All I know is nothing at all. The more I know, the less I'm sure, and the more relief I feel in that. There's freedom in that."

A cold wind rasped at the panes in short, excited bursts. Ghosts bit her face down to the root. The atmosphere was abrasive, a drying sand congealed to some primal form, losing its essence in the grip of the molder's hands. "I might be lonely, but it's so fucking good. It's like...it's like love, the ache of it. I- I think I'm addicted to that, Sean."

Giordi peeked out from behind the anxious voices clouding her vision. She still somehow harbored this tired, worn out hope that if she looked hard enough, she would find herself somewhere in him. Her loneliness was a hungry friction, scraping the walls of her sternum, conditioned after years of invisibility. She sits now at the precipice of flight, of self-embrace, of surrender. The search, the pain of feeling unique, they've dulled. The lonesomeness was a bliss against the static-y narrative of fighting to belong.

In his eyes she found no reflection, no mirror. Instead a suspended blue, a closed mosaic door. They searched back, despite their inability to see beyond themselves.

Giordi sighed, her own doors closing, a quiet slip into the protective fluid of her mind and body. Submersed in that amniotic mineral bath, safely behind the iridescent portals that face her world, she observed from afar. Ready to detach. Sean stood before her, his close breaths an assault. His calfskin shoes stuck like muddy sinkholes to the black walnut flooring.

Giordi could taste his fear, his paused confusion. He was a deer on a forked road, and she was the woman steering the tank, wondering how long it would take him to jump out of the way before she lost patience. Before she decided to just...keep going. She had decisions of her own to make.

A dry gasp or gulp broke the silence of waiting. Fidgeting, fingers shifting, air a dry echo from his parched throat. "What do you mean?" So light, hardly insistent, a muted almost-plea. He already knew he would surrender. He knew his world would shatter. He could not jump out of the way. She would roll right over him, and never look back.

Giordi closed her eyes, took an imperceptible breath, and settled further into herself. "I mean, Sean, that I want to be alone. I would rather be alone than unseen."

Sean's throat caught, but his expression remained the same, open and suspended and white. "I would rather be alone. I..." Another centering breath from Giordi. "...I want to be seen. I need to see myself, and that...and that means I can't see you." The words were coming to her, rushing now through some crack in the levy. "I need to be alone because I need the space to...to explore, to be. I've given up so much ground I no longer know where to stand. I don't know what I have a stake in, anymore. I don't know who I am. I can't feel myself - I don't know if I've ever felt myself. I don't know if I've ever truly seen myself before."

She opened her eyes, feeling taller than she ever had. "If I can't see myself, I can't expect you to see me either. Not in the way I need to be seen...the way I need to be known, or loved." Exasperated, now. "I can't be invisible anymore, Sean. I have to choose me. I have to discover the parts of myself that don't know the light. I'm choosing that unknown, that darkness over this stagnancy, this stalemate of us wanting from one another what just...isn't there."

Giordi's voice came from rifts, canyons, worlds away. Sean knew without hearing. He could feel her now, this liquid strength that pulled her up from the sunken place they'd existed in for so long. He hadn't even known how low they'd lived until this moment. Water cold as a mountain stream filled his skull, shocking him to the surface. He suddenly drew himself up too, as best as he could, stealing her resolve where his own failed him, where his voice cracked and his eyes stung. He used it to patch the spaces where his fingertips numbed and his knees buzzed, weakened and ready to fall.