Sine Waves

You see me scraping off newspaper gunk and watching you through the holes I punched in the classifieds and you make that snort that’s meant to appease me and I say I could sit here right now and transfigure to something like eternity because we’re all made of stars and if someone thinks something hard enough they can make it happen and you wonder about why I can’t love you but you won’t say that because you don’t want to hear it come out so I collect our seeds in the clay pot you shaped and kilned for me that one year when I gave you nothing but a smile and I asked if you’d want to dance to that one song but you were going to break up and now we’re sitting out in the vapor with the tide coming in and another guy out and testing it with his boots and it’s after when you found out for the first time with that howl you did, that howl that scraped me out, and you said you could get him to fuck you right now if you wanted to and your fingers were slipping and I was on my knees in the sand trying to hold you back and the line where one blue met another was graying and I said please as if that would matter but you’d ask him right in front of me and act like we’d never met and I could watch your coalescence and know and feel that Hurt, not could but would, and I’d know for once in my selfish ungrateful fucking life what it felt like to know that the other was slipping irretrievably away and I said it was because of my mother and I said it was because of my past and you said fuck you in that way where your eyes turned to slits and I said please be quiet they’ll hear and you wanted them all to hear, you’d scream to the mountaintops if you had to, if that’s what it would take for me to see, because this isn’t what life was supposed to be, wasting out youth and fertility and crumbling to some insistence that This Was The Last Time and there’d be no other and more promises than either of us knew what to do with and I said I loved you in that wounded way that I knew you liked and you revoked that word from me, pulled it out and tossed it into the water and let it get taken to sea and you went to the man with the boots and you kissed him right there in front of me, pushed him onto cold sand and ripped off shirt as the water came in as sine waves and was this what I wanted and was I happy now and did I see and could I feel and he kissed back and skirt was hiked and deed was done and he left his boots behind and trailed away with fickle prints and I think that was when I knew I loved you, as you dripped and came back over, as the angry tears washed in and the tide kept up unknowingly and I couldn’t move anymore, couldn’t move or wouldn’t and the distinction didn’t matter because it was done and over and you knelt beside me and we cried together just like that and words didn’t have to be said because the water said them for us and you hugged me like you did the first time I told you I loved you, when I tried on the wound and you liked it and we fused into each other because we had to, and you let me replace him and his seed, you said I could replace him because I knew and I felt now and we transfigured into something like eternity out there on the sand, the sine waves rippling past and dying away to become something else.

Nicholas Olson is a fiction/screen writer with a BA in Cinema Art + Science from Columbia College Chicago. A triple finalist in the 2013 Written Image Screenwriting Competition, he currently resides in the Chicagoland area where he’s crafting a novel and wrangling a cat. He has work published or forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, The Open End, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He can be stalked at http://nicksfics.com.