Status Updates From The Perfect Man

Feeling was like resonance in empty chambers, chambers eaten out with increasing precision by restlessness, despair and longing. A love song sung beautifully by someone heartless and vain. If one has imagination, one doesn't love, one imagines love,

She sat against a tree, listening to the drowning trill of the redwing blackbirds, watching the midgets and dragonflies, the cattails catching fire in the last sun, blazing unconsumed, memory, nostalgia, the last light of each day drawn deep into the earth.

Whatever was inside them, however terrible, was transforming, under pressure of hard work, silence and tenderness, into something resembling love. The cost, though, was that they were never in love, since they existed for each other too obliquely. Love occupied the spaces between, worried the edges of their consciousness like a song neither could quite remember.