Age twenty, the both of us. I am not quite sure when or how we met, it was probably inevitable going to the same
school together away from our
small towns, so similar that we slowly
gravitated closer until we were functioning in synchronization. Ended up in the same room together that year working on the same
projects trying to nail down the common visions we shared, meshing like intricate overlapping
clockwork. And this melting was probably why we both ended up one day thinking the same
burnt out thoughts forming an
escape plan. Break free we would start to make our own way, having gathered what we could from the school. It would be impossible to stay.
Things were in motion before we departed the walls, they had to be. Our
escape velocity was several contracts for small projects which gave us dollars in our pocket and a crucial innocent confidence. We had the major step out of the way.
A friend had been for several months operating a small
bookstore struggling along with the same initial
fragility as ours, so we made a proposal. We told her that she had
office space she was not using which we could
rent from her and help out the store financially. Puzzled, she said that she did not have any spare space at all. Indeed, physically the place was
crammed all corner to floor closet trying to get the most out of not enough. We explained. She was not using the space half them time she was paying for it.
After hours. Proposing that we would now make use of the building
around the clock, operating a bookstore by day doors closing to a
design house we would
crank through the night, in the morning clear our things below out of the way and head off to bed. Haphazard as it may seem,
it started to work well, and we needed it to so bad anyways. It was infectious, this spread to the use of her home as
winter crawled cold in and business slowed, trading use of the
bed operating on our seperate and reverse schedules.
Though we knew it would suck the life draining from us we thought that it might not be so bad, since we were on an opposite schedule than everyone else. Waking to the sun setting slipping to dreams as the sun was rising to the rest of the world, as if
time was running backwards. And with everything running in reverse, we thought that some of it might
rub off on us. Soon we began to tell
stories to each other backwards, hoping that it might make us
grow younger. It permeated every aspect of our lives, we began to think, move, and work in reverse a recoil from the end.
We grew tired, and perhaps we did not even notice. We were so confident in all the little movements that we missed what they meant when assembled
as a whole. The seasons pass and everything fades away, working so blindly like that. How could we tell when our world was half a day shifted from everyone else, there was so little overlap that just as we were starting to
get our bearings, it would all
slip away again. Before they could tell us
what was happening.
And then one day we woke up.
it started when we talked