+ Chapter XLII +

I met him in a hallway.
Sure that I had seen his rugged face before – solemn – paved with happiness and joy.
Months passed before I had the courage to dig my toes into the earth,
Stand in front of him,
And make some joke about death and fireworks and everything I hated about the world.

He smiled and listened and looked me straight in the eye.
I thought about all the mutants who never saw me for who I was. Never bothered to find out more than two details about me.
All the ones that thought they’d take over the world; their ideas flowing throughout the cosmos, ready to break and take hold. The waves. The wires. The everything-that-could-be.

Like children we were.
While the conversations in secret held more imagination and philosophical entropy than anything I had ever fathomed before.
Stars were bursting! Colliding!

He would
Never
Be mine.

I knew I didn’t want him to be.
If he were, it was bound to be ruined.
The utter romance of it all would have been washed away in the tide of changes and foul moods.
So, we kept things in fantasy.
Like castles on hills and ladies in distress.
We kept the primal nature of eroticism next to our stomachs, and we imagined our fingers running through one another’s insides.

Then one night,
There was thunder.
And there was lightning.
And Los Angeles was on fire.
Ablaze.

Destruction had come.