you walk along the same avenues in the winter, another year. the houses and the angles of the streets; the cracks in the concrete a little wider now. these images are the clearest: the shadows along the walls, the degree of darkness of a room; the height of the ceiling, the distance between buildings, the shades of grey and the cold touch of the railings. the smells perhaps too, though distorted. you can recall the cadence of his speech but not the words. you cannot recall the events leading up or what happened afterwards. in many ways it might not have happened at all.
there was an exchange across time zones, in march it was, but the year is unclear. it was a very cold winter. time meanwhile has fallen prey to the inevitable disintegration that comes with the incessant replaying of events, each time burning off the edges until the clippings stand isolated and overturned.
only the sensation of falling remains imprinted in your muscle memory, and the lights shutting down.
his mouth shaping words that are lost now and the noise all around, above and below, there was a wall, there must have been a wall you were leaning against, and a car at the end of the night, heading north.
these places now have become impossible to return to, not only those of this story but all of comparable circumstantial designs: a door to the left, a breath of icy air behind, the occasional flickering of car headlights as they pause by the traffic light outside, the clicking of glasses to the right in the back, the pattern on the floor and the fabric on the chairs, a preemptive reenactment of what had not happened yet which you would only become aware of much later.
black hair black hair.
they come and go, the half-bloods, along the edges of darkness, as a tide which they will carry with them at all times, a gradual rhythm of disappearing so imperceptibly slow yet irreversible. your blood is black, black, they would say, and your bones are glass, and the towers of your birthplace have long crumbled.
