1.
The air is chilly high up on top of the skyscraper, biting, whipping my hair into a swarm of stinging insects pricking at my eyes, hooking their way down the pores of my exposed skin. The chill of the concrete seeps into the palms of my hands, the seat of my pants, against the backs of my legs.
The cold leaches into my muscles, infusing my bones, crawling molecule by molecule into my organs, turning each of them one by one by one to ice.
A solid block of ice, clear and shimmering, soaked through with a million shades of colors. Blues, greens, reds, yellows, colors still yet unnamed, still not yet witnessed by another human.
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Really is a realist, uninterested in fiction when it has facts. Exclaiming in a loud voice, its curiosity overrides its reticence in its search for the literal retelling of events. Really has an honesty that can be taken in extremis, but its lack of doubt is refreshing.
She says Really, frown lines smudged into her forehead. And the doubt that colors her voice sinks into his skin like invisible tattoos. He deserves it, knowing he’s stood her up multiple times already. Why should she believe in his promised presence? Still, it hurts the way a heavy weight on his ribcage hurts, deep and crushing and silent. He remembers those early gold-dusted days when she had no knowledge of his failings, when she had no memories of what his excuses sounded like. So what if his excuses were legitimate? How legitimate could they be if their jagged edges tear away pieces of her fragile trust? He reaches out for her hands, and tucks away the glimmer of joy when she places them in his safe-keeping without hesitation. At least he still has this. For now. She says Really, and he nods, willing her to give him one more chance to prove himself.
"My name is Alice. I’m an alcoholic and I’m trying hard not to be," she’d said before heading back to her seat, her pointed chin held high, red brushed over sharp cheekbones, and lips pressed together. Alice never said anything more after that first time. Only snuck in after the meetings started to sit on the hard metal folding chairs, then disappeared through the YMCA door afterwards with minimal interaction.
Wendy didn’t know why she still came to AA meetings herself. While she still struggled most days, she’d found her steady footing, sober for over five years. Perhaps it was the familiarity, the routine. Perhaps she’d still been searching for something, someone, but hadn’t known it until Alice.
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Quite is a drama queen, shifting from one extreme to another, never happy with the middle ground. It likes to step out of the crowd around it and be noticed. With a high opinion of itself, Quite surrounds itself in the extraordinary, the exceptional, and the geniuses. Yet, it’ll suffer no fools. Quite gets to the root of the matter, speaking the truth in a no-nonsense manner. It lives in a black-and-white world. It is or it isn’t, nothing else.
She says Quite, delighted, bowled over by the puppies engulfing her with their flyaway fur and slick tongues and gleaming noses. He has been replaced by faces much hairier than his, the outlines of his body blurring into the general background of other-things-not-puppy. It doesn’t bother him. He’s always known he may come first to her on most days in this present-day scenario, but he ranks far below puppies and kitties and other animals with pelts much fluffier than his. Instead, he laughs, his camera phone capturing her and the surrounding vague blurs of frenetic action. When they leave, though, her whole face and body collapses into the center of her being. “Can’t we bring one home? Just one?” Someday, he says to her, someday we’ll have a home with a big backyard and a white picket fence and room for a hundred puppies to roam, even as he can’t even begin to imagine a scenario in which a hundred puppies can fit into a normal suburban household. Someday, he repeats for emphasis. And the fact that he can say someday, that their future together is so assured as to be predicted and assumed satisfies him the way he never understood during the phases of his life he shunned companionship and even during phases when he longed for it. She says Quite, and it sounds like agreement, like confirmation. It sounds like truth.