I know what you’re going to say.
You’ll be reassuring, or you’ll be coy, or you won’t say anything at all.
Your script hangs like a silver plaque in my mind. Some details are
marked as unknown, a value of x or y that spirals off into an infinity of
potential scenarios.
Some facts are etched far into the metal, because you’ve
made the same choice over and over. I know everything that’s written on
that near-mirrored surface. Shining and nearly perfect, I have a model of
you. Each angle I’ve ever seen you from. Every mood, every light, every
surface you’ve ever reflected in, even people.
Swift doesn't know it, but soon after
you two met, she adopted a certain tilt of the head while
listening. Something anyone could see, and nobody does. That happens all the
time, you know... people reflect onto each other, then re-adopt their own
mannerisms as reflected back to them, modified by whomever else mimicked them.
Did you know that most of the criminals we go up against have seen ’The
Labyrinth’?
I’m not kidding.
Who are you?
For all I know about you, that’s the one question I can’t fully answer.
I can’t be you. I can’t make you up in my mind, and be *sure* that I
have everything right. I never will. Every day I know you more, every day
I see thousands of things about you that I never noticed before, or things
that have changed since I last looked over at you.
I see the way your skin
moves over your face when you speak, and I see the way your uniform’s most
recent incarnation is sewn just a little differently in the left shoulder than
the one before it was.
When you look into the red, crystal-shard guts of
the bleed, some part of you is afraid, even though you’re standing safe on
the observation deck and you think you’re just watching in contemplation
and awe. I see your eyes tarnish and brighten according to your moods.
I know that if anybody ever measured the way you project heat, they’d
find that your corona pulses in exactly the same rhythm as your heartbeat.
And the beauty of it is, five minutes from now I’m going to notice
something else.
You scare the hell out of me sometimes. If I had to wake up one day and know that all I’ve seen of you so far
would have to be would have to be enough...
Maybe I would still be able to ‘see’ what you’d do in any possible
situation. Maybe I would be able to picture the tilt of your head, and
the way your hands curl around cloth, that leaves starburst patterns
crushed into it for days afterwards.
Maybe I would get it perfect.
But I’d still miss you.
~Fin~
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