sidewalk

I told you about my obsession with parallels, first thing when we started talking. You didn't understand my image of a second me walking beneath, her feet mirroring mine. But we met, and you became another piece of my parallels.

You were the man turning twenty-five, the sides of his helmet squeezing his cheeks in. Nearly four in the morning when you deposited me at 606 for the first time, helping me unbuckle the straps around my chin. It was finally the beginning of something new, hugging you until I thought my heart would explode.

I told you about the night barely two months before, when somebody else dropped me off that very sidewalk. He had a bike with him too; an orange dockless one that continued being shared among strangers after he abandoned it at his own void deck. I was in the hoodie that he had just bought me, the very one I'd worn meeting you for the first time.

I went back further eight years before, when I was fifteen and somewhere else you had just started poly. When yet somebody else sent me home on his bike, my white Converse jumping off the pegs by his wheels. In his hoodie this time, a long black one with thin white stripes. It was only then that you understood my parallels; that eventually, you would find your own.

Having you in my routine now gives me extra ten minutes of sleep in the morning, sometimes twenty. You refused to let me go work by myself as long as you could still send me. So there you always were, scrunching up your face beneath your helmet as way of waving. You always come when I least expect it, making a U-turn at the vacancy of the lot before stopping right in the shade.

Sometimes you wore glasses, lens when you had to be somewhere else afterwards. Sometimes you would have packed lunch for me, with an egg that your mother rushed to fry while you were in the shower. And sometimes, once in a blue moon, you would be soaked from the rain, your maroon pants turning dark red.

I had hoped you would be the last person I'd see on this sidewalk. The last person I would wave goodbye to until out of sight. The last person I would wrap my arms around and kiss. It's been more than two months since you started dropping me off at 608 instead, but it was enough for me to choose the arms that lifted me off the old sidewalk, stones pressing against our chests.