where has the good gone?

You hadn’t seen anything special in her. You’d seen the same things everyone else had seen. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that caught just your eye. What had caused you to turn in your walk from your general path of ordinary passage to class that morning had been what caused every other male in the vicinity to do the exact same thing. It was her beauty, it was her confident stride, and it was the way that suddenly, everything made sense just from the certainty with which she looked ahead, knowing that her future was one of hope, but one not to dwell too much on either. It was the present, it was her rapture, and it was a forever changing now. But that now was nothing new, caught like a butterfly pinned upon a display, pinned by every metal assumption, every stick and every tool. You knew what you had seen, and for this you were crushed.

You traced her body with your mind, finger moving slowly and unconsciously in a slight hourglass formation, tucked away from the world in the pocket of your corduroy nerd pants. Alas, their ends stopped several inches above your ankles, and this even though your mother had let the hems out last spring. For this reason you cursed your very sight, your very luck to glance her way, you cursed literally and under your breath and loud enough that her attention was caught, as always it had gone. After all, the present was where she was living and now you had just become a part of it, whether you liked it or not.

After a scan that trailed your head to your hairy, bony ankles to the whole at the front of your shoe that was your big toe, at the same time taking in the library behind you and the hill that trailed into the nothingness of a sunken world, she walked toward you and took something off your sleeve. You froze at her touch as anyone would have and you thought your heart would stop working and, naturally, you would die, but as the hair fell from her fingers to the sidewalk beneath you realized that you were still unfortunately alive and this you could not be happy with. You wondered silently where the good had gone, even as she gestured with her hand toward yours, even as her smile shrunk her eyes upward, the lashes uniting over her irises for the moment that her laugh came out slight and beautiful, even as you shook the hand and stopped breathing, thinking that though you could not control your homeostatic instincts of flight or fight, these reactions to a situation your dreamt nightmares of every night, would perhaps be the end that you wanted.

But you were not original. You only saw what the world saw.

A sunken chest whose burial dirt could only be the dirt that would be your end. You saw this as your eyes closed soundlessly and you did not let go, holding on to the only hand you had ever taken. The hand was harsh though, the skin not soft like you hand imagined in those first seconds of unconscious intrigue. Where had the good gone, you thought when you realize that softness did not always follow suit with assumption. You were let down as you always were, and as you opened your eyes to match level with her own tear stricken ones, you realized that you had ruined everything. You hadn’t seen anything special in her. You’d seen the same things everyone else had seen. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that caught just your eye. She could not believe that you had assumed. You saw this in her eyes and in her now and in the silent way she dropped the only hand you had ever taken. As you let go the mask fell off and the pin dropped and splattered its cushioning water on the glass that surrounded us all. You saw her grotesque face and her pleading stare as around us the world stood attentive and critical. Around us, the world cried.