J<&>W

My own hands pressed against the revolving door, but my nerves were cuddled deep inside my palms, and I felt nothing but a faint surprise that someone was turning the door.

I am a lover of certainty, and I could not be sure of anything.

Rain has always walked the most curtained moments of my life- rain and no umbrella. My hair stood out in little curls furred over with mist from the almost-invisible drizzle. I bit my lip around the details, and thought reasonlessly about my shoes on the polished floor and my hands hiding away from me and my hair carrying in the mist and my eyes and what they might see.

10 A.M. The clock was like a person overdressed on the wall, giving out uselessness with the ceremony of life-and-death. I blew it a kiss with my scattered mind, and advance on the lobby. The wind does not blow in here; it is humid like me.

I have little halls in my body, unopened windows, old secrets. 10:10 A.M. and no one is here to open up my chest.

I half suspected this. My hands are little huddled people around my neck.
--
10:15 A.M. He is here. He looks different than before. His hair does not move so much.

War kissed his body back maybe to something like it was before. Real war. My hair curls into my eyes, but I was long ago ripped off my interest in scarlet sashes, so I let it fall.

I wonder if he will speak. I wonder if we still know how to speak.

He puts his fingers against his fingers; he never used to do that. I tilt my head at him. My lips bite out details: a scar on his wrist, a scar in his eye, the rain falling harder against the gilt-framed window. My own hand tightening on the arm of the chair, the carving pressing into the pale skin of my wrist. My wrist are not so young as they were. The skin slips around in wrinkles when my eyes are tired from a long day. I sometimes walk around a ruined white pyramid.

"Hello," he says. No name for me, not since names began to mean something more than a word inverted on itself and cut away into nothing. His voice talks out of his mouth like he has stitches in his lungs, but I am not sorry, because before, it talked out of foreign lungs that I had in my own chest.

"Hello," I say. No name for him, because his old name is hard and twisted like scar tissue from 1984. I am sick to death of scar tissue. I stand up. I am not young, but my body aged well and my hair is pretty with mist; I wore the dress I knew he would like. I stand up, and it is like the untying of a scarlet sash.