The Mathematics of Distance.

She is not sure of her own sanity. Last night she was stuck between two giant fears. She was afraid that, as she lay on the floor of her sisters apartment, a few blocks away, her apartment was burning down.

She closed her eyes to hear the sirens.

The second thought put her into a less immediate panic, but emptied her of any full she felt. It was an instant but she was able to stop it, slow it down and see it. Maybe the Matrix was right, she hadn't even seen the whole thing, but it made so much sense that we were all just plugged into some giant dream generator. She thought that perhaps all her relationships were intended and feigned, that everything feeling like reality was just a psychotic delusion marred from the bottom of a grey steel cell with her arms wrapped locked around her body.

She opened her eyes and felt the carpet and her hair and her face and her thighs.

Tangible does not mean real. Imploring ones self to see rationally does not mean one will and then she was frightened. She cried because maybe this confusion was the only real thing. That the reason music is always playing, and she reads books with implausible situations, and drinks heavier than the city rains is because the need to withdraw herself is too great. Because in order to continue she needs to lie to herself until the death.

She holds her eyes open in fear of dreaming.

The day is numb but the night is for her. She falls into sleep and drops into strange places. She stands on cliffs miles above the earth only to see it has been flooded. She watches her friends die in black and white and red. She hears clapping and laughing and runs through long blue corridors of old crumbling buildings wondering if she will see the one solace.

She pulls her knees to chest and cries. Long slow heaves that pull swollen organs.

In her he leaves a trail of absence, and stirs in her an inexplicable amount of everything and nothing. There is a love with no label, and questions all together the science of this LOVE.

a+b=x but x=x and a= nothing at all.

but with him a+b=ab, and x=x, and on its own a= nothing, but paired with b, a becomes real.

She stands up and walks into the bathroom and writes these equations on the mirror with eye pencil. She sees them reflected twice and wishes she could squeeze an = between the reflections so there would be less mess. Purged onto the mirror she stands back and feels her left hand palpitate. Blood flows alright and she sits on the toilet drawing her knees to her chest. She is a. And he is b. and with out the other neither make sense.

and it makes perfect sense.

a remembers when once she told b when b feared his sanity...

...because you are not a normal person, if they cut you open it would be caverns and magnets and polars and alchemy would resurface as the ancient truth and in it is all because of you. We are not normal people. And we don't have a normal friendship. And this wont end badly because we both need each other too much, as both tangible and intangible movements.

She empties her head and sees her with him, standing on the edge of the end of the world with the only hand to hold is his.