He really couldn't say when they or where they first met.
All he could recall was that she was in a hurry to go somewhere and that he was never in a hurry to go anywhere. The streets of the city were a gray dirty affair like the stoic jumble of disorganized chaos crammed in between the orderly building blocks that defined his world. There were glimpses of color but most days were just gray, so gray that the word "were" drove him crazy with the desire to find a can of paint and throw it out onto the grayness just to change the predictability that existed from street to street.
Then she appeared in his path as he trudged through the city on his way to a job that was largely meaningless other than it gave him income to continue to exist in this dull sense of life among the gray boxes of the city. She was a thin girl, almost a whisper of a dream, in gray clothes like the other people on the sidewalks trudging midst the bland colors of cars trundling along in their collective gaseous wakes. what made her stand out to him as she was walking straight towards him, a RED blouse peeking out from under her torn gray coat.
When the intersection between them finally closed she looked up into his eyes and smiled. Then it was as if they had always known each other. A certain familiarity seemed to exist there between them, as the rest of humanity crowded around them as if they had become an island in the stream of emotionless motion. She reached out to touch his arm.
"There you are." She said. Her voice small yet strong.
His heart thudded into his chest, breathing was harder than normal as if her red blouse had awoken the blood in his veins.
"Where are you going?"
"To- to work." Help! I need to talk, I need to breathe. "I think."
"Great, I will walk with you."
She kept a hold of his arm as she turned to stand beside him and they began to move back into the mortal current of urban life.
Strangely, he could never remember whether they ever made it to his job or not.
The walk was all there was in that memory, that and the RED blouse, her smile, the touch of her hand in his.
Time passed.
He wasn't sure how much, but it could have been days, weeks, years. Each day, he would leave his small featureless apartment and meet her on the streets. He was never sure it was in the same place, he never stopped to consider that it was. She was always there before him. He seemed to be always late.
She would come up to him and say:
"There you are."
And the walk would begin, usually ending when (and if) they got to his job. It would resume when he left at the end of his shift. She would be waiting for him outside his building.
"There you are."
The soft touch of her warm hand.
Sometimes they would walk on by his workplace, and spend the day walking the streets looking at nothing other than each other, Him, trying to memorize every inch of her. She leaning slightly against his shoulder, the faint smile playing against her lips. They did not talk much, except to decide what turn was next.
At the end of the day, she would stop and he would realize that they were at his building. He would go over, every reason he could think of to ask her up to his tiny one-room apartment. Every cause that would make her come to his bed, but nothing came as they would look into each other's eyes.
Then she would let go of his hand, smiling up at him before turning away and disappearing into the crowd of people who always seemed to be all around them.
Time passed.
Seasons in the city are somewhat indistinct. It's warm, then it's wet, then it's cold, sometimes it's windy, some days it is so hot that everything slows down to a molten state. Nothing moves but the endless stream of vehicles moving across the overpass, the tarmac asphalt going nowhere but always going.
They stood in the rain, they were standing in the rain when it all changed.
"I've got to go." She suddenly said. There was no smile on her face.
"I'm running late."
He looked down at her, all his forgotten fears creeping out of the shadows where they had apparently been hiding.
"Will you come back."
She tried to let go of his hand but he found he did not want to let go.
She forced a smile as she looked down at their hands.
"I'm sorry." He said and forced his hand to let go of hers.
She looks disappointed for a brief moment, then she was gone and he was there standing alone in the rain.
She did come back, but it wasn't the same.
For one thing, He would walk out of his building in the morning and not find her where he was sure that she usually waited for him. She would eventually show up, rushing along slightly ahead of the wave of crushing humans pushing along towards their collective destinations.
"I'm running late." She would say taking his hand, pulling him along.
They would walk to her place of work, another featureless shell squatting in the concrete forest of buildings. She would look up at him and say:
"I've got to go."
Then her hand would slip from his and she would be gone into the dull monolith and he would be alone in the chaos of the day.
When he got off, he would not find her waiting for him so he would wander back to her place of work only to wait for minutes that seemed like hours and perhaps they were. She would finally emerge from her building looking tired and taut as if she was wound up to breaking. Then he would take her hand and they would walk away from that place back to his apartment.
They would pause there and as he would begin to search for the words that would not come she would slip her hand from his and smile sadly before vanishing out of his life once more.
He wasn't sure about what had happened until one day, when the rains had stopped and the chills began to fill the city streets. On that day, as he stood waiting for her, he knew what had bothered him for all the past few weeks or months, she no longer wore that red blouse. He felt, perhaps for the first time, a dread, a kind of despair as he knew that her hands were no longer warm either, they had grown cool, that they had become harder than the softness they had once shared. Such a sweet sense of sorrow filled him at that moment, there on the curb as a cold wind howled through the steel canyons of this unforgiving city.
She was there, in front of him, she looked up into his face, as the tears wet his skin. She smiled nervously biting her lip. He shook his head, he didn't even know her name.
"I'm running late." She said reaching for his hand.
Time stopped.
"I don't even know your name," he said.
"I've got to go," she whispered before she fled into the chlorinated fog rolling around them.
He didn't go back to work that day.
He didn't go back to work.
He lost that apartment.
He didn't see her again.
He went back to the place they met but she wasn't there.
He found another job. A job he could remember doing each day. He became a courier, ferrying packages and messages from one building to the next. One day, a message brought him to her place of work, the squatting behemoth of glass and rock clawing at the ever-present smog above it. He looked up at the doors of the place and fear and dread and excitement filled him. His heart hammered at his chest but he went in any way. He delivered his message to a man sitting behind a big desk who did not acknowledge his existence save only to take the letter from his outstretched hand, open it, read the paper and crumple it before dropping it into a waste can by his big desk. He left, as he walked down the long halls lined with windows, he could see the cubicle drones working away at their computers.
It was then he saw her. He froze in place in the hallway. She looked thinner than she had ever had and sad as she frowned at her monitor in concentration. She wore no colors in that white room with gray walls and gray desks, Her clothes were featureless as were those of all who sat around her.
I hate the word "were," he thought.
He wanted to pound on the glass but he knew it would do him or her any good.
He knew he had to act, to do something to bring the color back into her life.
He turned and walked away with a new confidence that he never knew he had.
She watched him go, trying to decide where she had seen him from.
Fear is the nature of life, she thought as her fingers rested on the keys of her keyboard. Who had that strange man been? No matter, there was always more work. Life is about the progress of work.
You can track it, see how far you have come, how far you can go.
Really, there is no time for anything else.
No time.
Her hands are shaking as they hover over the keyboard.
Carefully she pulls them into her lap where no one can see the fear grip them. Calm, I must be calm.
"Is there a problem?"
She looks up at the Man towering over her desk.
She shakes her head.
"Just a cramp, sir."
The Man tuts. clicking his tongue against his teeth in disgust.
"Sorry."
"Back to work." Is all he says.
She must force her hands back up.
The hours go by.
The day drags on.
The walk home is dull, a dull ache pushes against her brain.
She finds her small door, the narrow room that makes her apartment looms before her.
The narrow bed, gray sheets, the solitary window that faces the alley, the dead flower in the window box, the faded curtain drifts out on some current that filters down the alley promising a breeze that never comes.
She lies in bed waiting for sleep. She doesn't long for any comfort of it in the grey city in the gray night where the city illuminates everything with a subdued light that becomes gray as it clears the streets.
When sleep comes, the bliss of the Abyss follows folding her into a dreamlessness.
Except she did dream.
Once her formless soul fell into the REM state, she found herself in the colored dream.
Morning came.
She awoke staring at the ceiling of her apartment wondering what had happened in the night.
She tried to reach for it with her mind but the memory of the dream slipped away into the grey morning.
She got up.
She dressed in the drab clothes.
She brushed her teeth.
She ate the grey oatmeal.
She locked her door.
She walked out into the light.
She stopped at the corner almost sure she was supposed to meet someone.
Someone who never came.
She walked to the bus.
She rode the bus with the grey people there.
She walked into the grey slab building.
She rode the drab elevator to the 17th floor
She walked down the rows of identical desks
She sat down at her desk
Where a RED rose sat in a glass vase on her desktop.
She stared at the rose in shock.
The Man came to stare at the rose as well.
"What is this?' he says.
"I don't know, sir," she says.
It's a lie. She knows that somehow her dream has found her.
"Get rid of it." The Man says. "Then get to work."
She carefully lifts the rose out of the vase.
It is so light and soft, she almost fails to see the YELLOW note.
Carefully, she picks up the note, it reads.
"MeSan" that is all. but she remembers the name and what had happened before
she lost the dream. Now with the rose in one hand and note in the other she turns to find the Man considering her.
"I quit," she says.
"You can't quit. You're fired." He says.
She smiles at him, he flinches, no one smiles at him. She turns away and runs down the rows of identical desks past the drab sameness of people until she finds the stairs. Through the RED door and down the stairs. She barely notices the descent to the street. She steps out onto the curb to find him on his messenger bike there.
"There you are," he said.
All he could recall was that she was in a hurry to go somewhere and that he was never in a hurry to go anywhere. The streets of the city were a gray dirty affair like the stoic jumble of disorganized chaos crammed in between the orderly building blocks that defined his world. There were glimpses of color but most days were just gray, so gray that the word "were" drove him crazy with the desire to find a can of paint and throw it out onto the grayness just to change the predictability that existed from street to street.
Then she appeared in his path as he trudged through the city on his way to a job that was largely meaningless other than it gave him income to continue to exist in this dull sense of life among the gray boxes of the city. She was a thin girl, almost a whisper of a dream, in gray clothes like the other people on the sidewalks trudging midst the bland colors of cars trundling along in their collective gaseous wakes. what made her stand out to him as she was walking straight towards him, a RED blouse peeking out from under her torn gray coat.
When the intersection between them finally closed she looked up into his eyes and smiled. Then it was as if they had always known each other. A certain familiarity seemed to exist there between them, as the rest of humanity crowded around them as if they had become an island in the stream of emotionless motion. She reached out to touch his arm.
"There you are." She said. Her voice small yet strong.
His heart thudded into his chest, breathing was harder than normal as if her red blouse had awoken the blood in his veins.
"Where are you going?"
"To- to work." Help! I need to talk, I need to breathe. "I think."
"Great, I will walk with you."
She kept a hold of his arm as she turned to stand beside him and they began to move back into the mortal current of urban life.
Strangely, he could never remember whether they ever made it to his job or not.
The walk was all there was in that memory, that and the RED blouse, her smile, the touch of her hand in his.
Time passed.
He wasn't sure how much, but it could have been days, weeks, years. Each day, he would leave his small featureless apartment and meet her on the streets. He was never sure it was in the same place, he never stopped to consider that it was. She was always there before him. He seemed to be always late.
She would come up to him and say:
"There you are."
And the walk would begin, usually ending when (and if) they got to his job. It would resume when he left at the end of his shift. She would be waiting for him outside his building.
"There you are."
The soft touch of her warm hand.
Sometimes they would walk on by his workplace, and spend the day walking the streets looking at nothing other than each other, Him, trying to memorize every inch of her. She leaning slightly against his shoulder, the faint smile playing against her lips. They did not talk much, except to decide what turn was next.
At the end of the day, she would stop and he would realize that they were at his building. He would go over, every reason he could think of to ask her up to his tiny one-room apartment. Every cause that would make her come to his bed, but nothing came as they would look into each other's eyes.
Then she would let go of his hand, smiling up at him before turning away and disappearing into the crowd of people who always seemed to be all around them.
Time passed.
Seasons in the city are somewhat indistinct. It's warm, then it's wet, then it's cold, sometimes it's windy, some days it is so hot that everything slows down to a molten state. Nothing moves but the endless stream of vehicles moving across the overpass, the tarmac asphalt going nowhere but always going.
They stood in the rain, they were standing in the rain when it all changed.
"I've got to go." She suddenly said. There was no smile on her face.
"I'm running late."
He looked down at her, all his forgotten fears creeping out of the shadows where they had apparently been hiding.
"Will you come back."
She tried to let go of his hand but he found he did not want to let go.
She forced a smile as she looked down at their hands.
"I'm sorry." He said and forced his hand to let go of hers.
She looks disappointed for a brief moment, then she was gone and he was there standing alone in the rain.
She did come back, but it wasn't the same.
For one thing, He would walk out of his building in the morning and not find her where he was sure that she usually waited for him. She would eventually show up, rushing along slightly ahead of the wave of crushing humans pushing along towards their collective destinations.
"I'm running late." She would say taking his hand, pulling him along.
They would walk to her place of work, another featureless shell squatting in the concrete forest of buildings. She would look up at him and say:
"I've got to go."
Then her hand would slip from his and she would be gone into the dull monolith and he would be alone in the chaos of the day.
When he got off, he would not find her waiting for him so he would wander back to her place of work only to wait for minutes that seemed like hours and perhaps they were. She would finally emerge from her building looking tired and taut as if she was wound up to breaking. Then he would take her hand and they would walk away from that place back to his apartment.
They would pause there and as he would begin to search for the words that would not come she would slip her hand from his and smile sadly before vanishing out of his life once more.
He wasn't sure about what had happened until one day, when the rains had stopped and the chills began to fill the city streets. On that day, as he stood waiting for her, he knew what had bothered him for all the past few weeks or months, she no longer wore that red blouse. He felt, perhaps for the first time, a dread, a kind of despair as he knew that her hands were no longer warm either, they had grown cool, that they had become harder than the softness they had once shared. Such a sweet sense of sorrow filled him at that moment, there on the curb as a cold wind howled through the steel canyons of this unforgiving city.
She was there, in front of him, she looked up into his face, as the tears wet his skin. She smiled nervously biting her lip. He shook his head, he didn't even know her name.
"I'm running late." She said reaching for his hand.
Time stopped.
"I don't even know your name," he said.
"I've got to go," she whispered before she fled into the chlorinated fog rolling around them.
He didn't go back to work that day.
He didn't go back to work.
He lost that apartment.
He didn't see her again.
He went back to the place they met but she wasn't there.
He found another job. A job he could remember doing each day. He became a courier, ferrying packages and messages from one building to the next. One day, a message brought him to her place of work, the squatting behemoth of glass and rock clawing at the ever-present smog above it. He looked up at the doors of the place and fear and dread and excitement filled him. His heart hammered at his chest but he went in any way. He delivered his message to a man sitting behind a big desk who did not acknowledge his existence save only to take the letter from his outstretched hand, open it, read the paper and crumple it before dropping it into a waste can by his big desk. He left, as he walked down the long halls lined with windows, he could see the cubicle drones working away at their computers.
It was then he saw her. He froze in place in the hallway. She looked thinner than she had ever had and sad as she frowned at her monitor in concentration. She wore no colors in that white room with gray walls and gray desks, Her clothes were featureless as were those of all who sat around her.
I hate the word "were," he thought.
He wanted to pound on the glass but he knew it would do him or her any good.
He knew he had to act, to do something to bring the color back into her life.
He turned and walked away with a new confidence that he never knew he had.
She watched him go, trying to decide where she had seen him from.
Fear is the nature of life, she thought as her fingers rested on the keys of her keyboard. Who had that strange man been? No matter, there was always more work. Life is about the progress of work.
You can track it, see how far you have come, how far you can go.
Really, there is no time for anything else.
No time.
Her hands are shaking as they hover over the keyboard.
Carefully she pulls them into her lap where no one can see the fear grip them. Calm, I must be calm.
"Is there a problem?"
She looks up at the Man towering over her desk.
She shakes her head.
"Just a cramp, sir."
The Man tuts. clicking his tongue against his teeth in disgust.
"Sorry."
"Back to work." Is all he says.
She must force her hands back up.
The hours go by.
The day drags on.
The walk home is dull, a dull ache pushes against her brain.
She finds her small door, the narrow room that makes her apartment looms before her.
The narrow bed, gray sheets, the solitary window that faces the alley, the dead flower in the window box, the faded curtain drifts out on some current that filters down the alley promising a breeze that never comes.
She lies in bed waiting for sleep. She doesn't long for any comfort of it in the grey city in the gray night where the city illuminates everything with a subdued light that becomes gray as it clears the streets.
When sleep comes, the bliss of the Abyss follows folding her into a dreamlessness.
Except she did dream.
Once her formless soul fell into the REM state, she found herself in the colored dream.
Morning came.
She awoke staring at the ceiling of her apartment wondering what had happened in the night.
She tried to reach for it with her mind but the memory of the dream slipped away into the grey morning.
She got up.
She dressed in the drab clothes.
She brushed her teeth.
She ate the grey oatmeal.
She locked her door.
She walked out into the light.
She stopped at the corner almost sure she was supposed to meet someone.
Someone who never came.
She walked to the bus.
She rode the bus with the grey people there.
She walked into the grey slab building.
She rode the drab elevator to the 17th floor
She walked down the rows of identical desks
She sat down at her desk
Where a RED rose sat in a glass vase on her desktop.
She stared at the rose in shock.
The Man came to stare at the rose as well.
"What is this?' he says.
"I don't know, sir," she says.
It's a lie. She knows that somehow her dream has found her.
"Get rid of it." The Man says. "Then get to work."
She carefully lifts the rose out of the vase.
It is so light and soft, she almost fails to see the YELLOW note.
Carefully, she picks up the note, it reads.
"MeSan" that is all. but she remembers the name and what had happened before
she lost the dream. Now with the rose in one hand and note in the other she turns to find the Man considering her.
"I quit," she says.
"You can't quit. You're fired." He says.
She smiles at him, he flinches, no one smiles at him. She turns away and runs down the rows of identical desks past the drab sameness of people until she finds the stairs. Through the RED door and down the stairs. She barely notices the descent to the street. She steps out onto the curb to find him on his messenger bike there.
"There you are," he said.
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