Once he had a lover, but she moved.
And Harold closes the curtains against the sun now. The curtains are sheer so that the traffic on the street outside can still be seen moving past his window, alternating lanes right to left, left to right, but as indistinct forms through the filter of the saffron stratosphere of his world. This way, the window becomes like an impressionist painting or a film of an impressionist painting. He imagines that the traffic is not moving on an asphalt grid, that there are no traffic lights to stop it. He imagines, instead, that the cars at some point swerve elegantly, that the roads are ribbons, that the cars are trailing road ribbons behind them and weaving something like a tapestry around him. The tapestry is all ambered streaked with ochre sun rays and violet-muted poppy fields. Sometimes children stumble across in knee-high fields of plains grass, bursting their laughter in vibrant red and blue snags.
Where is Harold in this tapestry? He is collapsing a wave function into a singular view, cocooned in this working tapestry like a fly caught in a web. He extends his appendages to pace a floor or lift a drink or morsel to his lips. He parts his lips to let it pass. And inside, his system works like automation to volley the bolus from one element to the next as it succumbs to the process of entropy. Within him, the gears work as he supplies them.
A shaft of light escapes through the curtains’ part, scatters over bursting dust-mote galaxies, and illuminates just a corner of his room. Harold is stood there now, thinking of his lover and wondering why she moved.
