Rolled up in her hand is nothing special. After some hours of determined walking around, getting in and out of vehicles and places to perform boring errands, when the conversation is running empty and she is spacey and he is along for the ride, a wanton, negative memory floats by. She doesn't say anything, but notices him there by her side, looking ahead, and she wants to fire off something sharp-tongued before seeing he's in his own world, too. She sees him flanked by the world and its slow-cooling beauty, today the layers a little thicker, the sky gray and cloudy until after four, instead of clearing at noon. It's been a long day, and it's only getting longer.
She says his name, which wraps around him, and they stop, and they hug in a knot pulled straight from the archive of action--a knot of an embrace that looks familiar. She gives him a hug that says, "I am thinking about a lot that I'd rather not be thinking about, and I will think about it again, and thanks for standing next to each other again."
He's falling into her, though he looks more upright. She's already carrying more, resolved to be the sturdier of the two, though she wishes she were falling, too. There's a twisted roleplay in the embrace: two people cosplaying as the givers of what each needs, knowing and being unable to hide the impossibility (or futility?) or fulfillment.
His head tilts in a tiredness, he wants for something that he's tried to find many times in this same spot. She cares for him deeply, but it's not enough. He is looking for something to flood more and more care with, but it misses the mark. The shape, overall, has been drawn countless times, and though it can't exist as a recorded instance, it's well remembered and documented.
She comes for a hug, arms limp and limping, needing support. He is so excited to give it, and she knows that he is so eager to embrace because it fills some hole. The desire to give her all she's ever wanted is tainted, and she asks him what he wants, and he says it is only to hang onto those moments a little longer, which is a lie, only to go through time until another chance at the real love feeling, which is true but also an impossible lie.
Her deep love is perhaps pulled from some cave that just isn't his. The bottom of his love is slightly sad, and that makes her coat hang heavier, and it makes her drag on the cigarette a little cooler, and it makes him even more infatuated, and they balance like the forces that hold atoms together, keeping the world from imploding and exploding over and over again. The tensions that suspend them in equilibrium are carried by the forces of pattern recognition. The familiarity of the shape shows us that some things are true.
Smoke, not in the trying to quit way, but because it's what she does. They haven't found out yet, though they do already know, that when they step away from this embrace--when this moment relinquishes them and returns them to separate orbits--they'll only have a split second of overlap between eye contact and the lulling mode of the hug before they are checked back into reality and let go, remembering that they can't give each other everything they need, or even everything they wish to give to each other. They'll forget already that their hug lulled them to the imminence of dream, that her head was turned with her curls cushioned against him and she finally felt like smoke, falling upwards (which she always wished she could be more like, physically), and that with his head turned into the folds of her stylish jacket, he was beginning to feel everything his tiny head told him he was destined to feel, with a warm torso and arms wrapped around another warmth, and the low-throated lump of loneliness washing itself into the gut.
