Parallel People
Me. Me. Me.
In my wildest fantasy, I am a self-fulfilled, self-confident young professional at a stable job with a boyfriend and a graduate degree from a prestigious university.
You. You. You.
Still living in LA, like a ghost of years past, you keep coming back.
Her. Her. Her.
Abby is on her back deck, smoking a cigarette and having a glass of Chardonnay at 10am. Texting her ex. Rules don’t apply in quarantine.
——
Our lives once connected, now somewhere far off in the distance. Like the plumes of cigarette smoke cascading off the deck and into the windows of the house next door. Inevitability? Oblivious dreaming? A universe split down the middle, two separate homes, realities.
——
Abby is sitting on her back deck when a neighbor starts shouting next door; she looks up, and this neighbor is, incredibly, shouting at her to go inside.
Fire. Fire. Fire!
Sure enough, plumes of smoke are billowing out from the house directly behind Abby, directly behind her delicate wrist that had just moments before been lifting Chardonnay to the sky. In a toast to the gods, a 10am chink.
Drunk. Drunk. Drunk.
Is this what my destiny is? Pretending to have the life of my wildest fantasies when I’m secretly suffocating?
You. You. You.
As always, LA fires are something to witness and fear. Trees? Gone up in smoke. Gone like Abby.
Quarantine. Quarantine. Quarantine.
Of course this was bound to get its own section. It is sparse and silent. It is their newest natural disaster, lingering over everything like a cigarette haze.
Parallel. Parallel. Parallel.
Wildfire. Wildfire. Wildfire!
You are taking care of business. Calling the fire department when the house behind yours burns to the ground. Always one text away, in my wildest fantasies.
But you don’t text back and everything that brought them together, has disintegrated.
Is a drunken stupor the same thing as having a wild fantasy? Or, is there a split, two sides competing for center stage?
When Abby toasted to the gods, they responded.
We are a univese apart.