0.02 Meters

Mathematicians tell us to measure buildings in the number of meters,

In their world of smooth paper, and smooth gel tip pens, and smooth affluent percentages that

guarantee smooth affluent lives, if they are off by 0.02 it is of little consequence.

It is July and the sun is warming my skin.

“They found my phone” she says, laughing like aspen leaves rattling in the wind (the cool breeze

that dances through the campus),

She rubs her concealed wrist (concealed as always, I have never seen her forearms flex

exposed),

“So of course my natural response was to attempt.” she laughs again like nothing is funny but

like she hasn’t been trained on what to say in situations that aren’t supposed to happen to kids

like us,

my mind spins: a sun-faded pinwheel slowing to a stop. Attempt what? I wonder.

On her slim fingers, rings draw attention to the white bandages, red soaking through them,

medical tape folded over itself in ugly little lines like the scars we share,

protruding like bone from beneath her dark sleeve.

Attempt.

0.02 meters matters, I think blandly.

She is dead in our math problem. I have miscalculated the significance of the figures in her life,

and her hand has been moved on marionette strings by sparks of -55mv action potential bursts

across convoluted neurons, by 0.02 meters to the left.

She is a dead girl on icy floors for her parents to find and her friends to wonder for, then fear for,

then mourn.

She is the girl of my dreams.

I had this dream in April where she was dead and her parents wouldn’t let me see her body:

“ashes in the wind” they said.

So I climbed (scarf scratching my neck, soft coat whipping my legs, feet floating above rough

concrete because this is a dream and I am too heavy in life for such revelations) to the top of

the cemetery where I stood in the greek orthodox section surveying the city and murmuring

prayers in a language that I can no longer claim as my own.

She told me, when I relayed this dream to her in casual prattle, that it was momentous to her

that I cared that much.

In my dream she is dust in the wind for me to fail to grasp with harsh breaths, and to cry out into

the fastidiously manicured grass between the tombstones (that I am allergic to, that makes me

bleed and swell and scratch).

ghost, ghost, ghost,

In my July afternoon theater she is meat on the floor of a bathroom

crumbled like her sticky note origami crane at the bottom of my backpack,

she is stained with red like plum juice,

ghost, ghost, ghost

I see her arm pinned open like a cat on my school dissection table and I hear her whispering

voice shaking, “Ella I could see my tendons”,

shattering like glass her voice shivers (like me, the lost girl of my dream)

The dream collapses into razor blades, on a porcelain floor.

ghost. ghost. ghost.

In November, she is holding my shoulder, shaking me like aftershocks of a great wave,

“hey, you okay?” she laughs, voice rough and soothing like grout.

I look at her eyes and all I can think is that she is a beautiful corpse

(the mortician deserves a handsome tip, and in my mind I hand him my beating heart, and in my

hands he places hers)

‘You are dead’, I whisper to her.

I raise my arm to hold her hand, soft and rough and warm in mine.

‘You are still alive’ my voice quivers like it has no right to on a sunny November morning.

It has been 4 months and 11 days since 0.02 meters.