Shimmer

Sundown and the light hemorrhages across a bruised sky.
Cassandra, Cassie, Cay, this is the first time that I’ll ever see her and she’s standing on the roof of her house, waiting for the stars to fall, maybe.
Me, I’ve just hit the street corner, knowing that my friend Joey’s expecting me at his place, just five blocks down.
Cassandra, she’s dressed in a gray sleeveless shirt and gray shorts but she’s the only thing that steps out for me to see of an acid wash reality. And I’m thinking about parking my bike, a moped that I got for my sixteenth birthday, and saying hi, saying something, anything to her.
But, I keep driving.
And she keeps staring.
The sun keeps bleeding and the world moves on.

I could say that it was God who blew the paper plane towards me.
I could say that but I never did get into believing in imaginary people.
So it’s the wind that exhales the paper plane into flight, soaring past me before crash landing onto the sidewalk.
Cassandra, Sandra, Sandy, I’ve known of her for two years and not known her at all and she’s standing there, giving me an apologetic smile that makes me forget to breathe.
I give a half wave, a ditch effort of a greeting.
She takes a step forward and I do my best to hold my ground.
I wait and suddenly I’m left standing in the shadow of someone that she actually finds important at the time.
I’m standing and I’m staring not at the café she was in, or the table she was in, not at the people that were still there or the plane.
Instead I’m staring at her jacket and seeing just how red it is.

A minute. A day. A month. A year.
For me it apparently takes a decade.
Cassandra, Cassandra, Cassandra, she’s standing in front of me and I’m thinking of an anomaly, a glitch in the system, something wrong somewhere for her to be here, now, again.
Because airports are a half way point between coming and going.
Because she and I and everyone else are always on the road to disappearing.
But Cassandra, she calls my name. She says, “I know that we were never close, but you wanna go grab a quick drink?”
She smiles. And we walk. And she starts talking about high school.
And I’m left thinking, just for a split second, that maybe—
To love.
To trust.
To believe.
Therein lies the real anomaly.
And everything else fades away when she looks at me.