Etherial

There was something left right next to her in the corner of his heart; it was that pesky sense of nothing that we all become so familiar with once in a blue moon ago. Holding tight to the memories that they concocted in the back of his pickup truck in ‘98, she prayed for a natural disaster. Here and there, the wonder that she felt would return for a minute, but the longing for someone’s longing was about as intense as the tornado that was picking up East of the Mississippi and West of tomorrow.
She bought a color-by-numbers book to pass the time until the rest of the world realized that she was missing. Or remembered to care. Whichever came first, she would be waiting until that day to snap back from reality and toward the fantasy that she hungered for so completely. The dreams were so vivid now-a-days that she could never really tell the difference between lucidity and wishful thinking. And the rest of the fates, past and future, were laughing at the cruel, cruel joke their sister was playing on her; broken and heartless as she was, she couldn’t seem to shake off the present. Stuck in the eternal now, she realized that at some point, everything became the past and at a similar moment, everything stops being the future. Stopwatch planted firmly in her palm, she waited to pause the moment and savor it, attempting to live in the forever yet-to-be and always already-have.
She was something of a mystery, with eyes bluer than the arctic skies and skin paler than the lighted moon. She walked with a sway of a time long ago, smooth and edible despite her roughness. A year passed between each breath and the one before because she appreciated taking her time. The world all around her absorbed her presence so thoroughly that she was a little bit less of a person at the end of each day. And because of this, her gradually disappearing act, I was not even surprised when she left.