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her body was a mess. she was fidgety, she picked at herself, at her face, her scalp, she would pull out random hairs, she chewed on her lips, the inside of her mouth. something was always bleeding, bug bites became instant wounds that became spreading scabs that became wounds again beside the countless scars from old wounds on her legs and her arms, she looked like someone had been using her as an ashtray. and then there were the bruises, everywhere, all the time. some of them were her own doing, she pinched and tugged on her arms while she was watching a movie or just looking out the window--she spent a lot of time looking out the window, watching the neighbors' kids playing in the driveway next door, the squirrels skittering across the roofs and gutters, the sky changing colors, the moon doing nothing--but the rest of them were the result of her simply being herself, not clumsy, just

distracted. or maybe she possessed a sort of tragic zen-ness. it was like she couldn't remember where her body began and ended, forgot that she even had one, she walked into tables, chairs, street poles, parked cars, other people, she opened drawers into her shins, doors into her forehead. and the bruises puddled up, faint and yellowed or a shrieking red-violet that made me wince from across a room, every inch of her figure blooming with varying hues of malignant artistry. if you asked her she had no idea where they had come from. she clocked her shoulder on the doorway rounding the corner from her bedroom to the kitchen, didn't flinch or even look up, moved three inches to the side, kept going. she was so thin, she slouched and scrunched and became smaller still and i could imagine the clots and scar tissue being all that held her together.

according to classical physics, the divide between past and future is bridged by an infinitely small period of time, the present, which is constantly gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, before my brain can think past the first guttural shadows of the word "gone" that instant that i am trying to describe with it is already a million presents in the past. relativity challenged this with the idea that, while maybe immeasurably small, the present is a finite period, and its life span is in the hands of an individual observer who determines what's past and future, depending on which events he's trying to observe. so there isn't a present, really, but billions of independent presents that we are all solitary residents of. we are the architects of our own time; my universe isn't the same as yours, and since we have to live within the boundaries of our own perceptions we can be united in every moment but this one, this one, this one, this one, this one.

autumn and i were in different worlds, i don't think i ever questioned that. but watching her move through a room, a crowd, an empty expanse of grass, or sitting motionless seeing or not seeing everything else's presents fall unstoppably away, i believed sometimes that she had managed to not only make her own here and now endlessly diminished, but that she had eliminated it. she had conquered physics--classical, quantum, theoretical, experimental--and written a new law that spread her thin as a glaze of condensed breath across the full expanse of time. what was a body in the midst of all that? nothing to her, and so she ignored it, or, having seen the future of it, accepted it as already lost and abandoned it, maybe actively rejected it.

and i circled her, trailed her, lectured her from my present that was so far removed from hers, and thought i was the grown-up in the room, and didn't see anything coming, at all.