She walked down West 66th Street where it crossed Columbus. She liked to think she looked pulled together, smart, just extracted from a wax museum’s Ode to Offices. Her feet clicked confidently on the pavement, striding in dangerous stilettos so that her lithe body emulated a domestic cat on the prowl. Black covered her with silver peeping through in advantageous places, the mourning of a mundane life. Everything about her screamed professionalism. It was required and had carried out its duty since the Incident ten years before. She gazed apathetically at the cityscape and swung herself into a revolving door.

He almost glided down corridors, exiting the building as though analyzing an abstract painting. The man was a statue come to life, filled with a vitality that made his features dance to a secret song. It seemed that, should someone address him, he would respond with a charming laugh. As he reached the lobby, coated in marble under soaring ceilings, freckled tapers beat a processional on his ream of reports. These fingers were on elegantly wired hands, hands familiar with piano keys and yet powerful in elusive ways. He had just come from a meeting, and the confident carriage of his brow declared good tidings.

Everything in a human life can be turned upside down in an instant, resetting the hourglass and seeking answers. In the moment he turned to the revolving door, the marble tiles pulled out from under him.

He recalled a languid night of neon. The pulse of the city had been thrown into cardiac arrest, for this was a night of lunacy. The world could have ended around him and he wouldn’t have cared; all he knew in those small infinities was the nocturne her presence conducted in his head.

The sight of his stare assailed her lungs like a plunge into icy water. It transformed into the phantom of years ago. This was a shadow on the edge of her memory, keeping her transfixed and disheveled. That russet head had been tousled, her fingers running through it while the heady smell of honeysuckle deepened in the sun’s death throes. She remembered thinking that this was what Love tasted like.

His still charming, if more mature, mouth chanted something meaningless to her through the lead glass partition. Reality flew back to its mark on murky bat wings, the ceaseless questions chasing her down with the speed of Furies. Was it too long ago? Surely they could not start over now. Why had they fallen from Paradise in the first place? Had this happened today in a more secluded venue, would they have reconciled? In a city sprawling with denizens, the City that Never Sleeps, could their paths cross again? Her eyes caressed every detail of his person as he melted into the crowds, knowing that as he descended a metro stair, her heart and all expectations would be buried with him.

This was how she had become practical: haplessly wasting opportunities. She paced to the row of elevators, each resembling a guillotine. Hopefully a wire would snap on the way up. In a perfect tragedy or an escapist love, there are no survivors. She entered, the dreariness of Realism enveloping her. Where was her sense of dream and irrationality? It had passed on long ago. The doors were beginning to close when the rapid flicker of freckled tapers shot between their chrome.

His eyes with such fulfilled hope made the world of steel monoliths cease to exist. She was in a rose garden’s labyrinthine corridors, where no one watched or cared if she wept openly. Her Pyramus was returned from the dead. There were only his arms to be ensconced by and his laughter on her cheek to promise the price of eternity was not impossible.