The lights flared and convulsed like writhing worms overhead. The airport was a concert light-show, beaming upon Jack’s face, slicking him with sweat, singeing his pupils to a dilated disorientation. The sporous limbo between security and terminal-6 hung in the air as they lugged ahead with a lugubrious repulsivity. The carpet sagged under his feet, dirt-tracked and pigmented a moldy pomegranate juice color that stained his soles like pigs blood. A witty saying was shaggily sheared into it’s gory stature. It was funny. Mara tee-heed and hollered and slapped her knees in a paraoxym of hilarity, scattering a hansel-and-gretelesque trail of beady tears. “The furure awaits!”

Jack shadowed his face under a crook of safety—the length of his arm— and cowered within his cool defense from the glaring lights. Mara’s breezy laugh, the mellifluous flower-petal sonata of her voice; Jack remembered she had not yet faded into a whisper. She soothed the shocking brightness overheard and warmed it to the wavelength of the smiling sun. Ah, when they would dance and weave tanned limbs together like an amateur’s basket. Under that fat sun that simmered skin to a sweet smelling red on a pillow of checkerboard quilt, scooping up eyefuls of marbled blue skies and sloping hills. Trudging in limbo, Jack’s lips—petals of their own—drifted in the sun-ruffled breeze that is Mara and rosily swooped upward.

Jack thrust a glance backward at the carpet, into the past. He hoisted the now-dawning urge to see, to chat, to feel in the final lingering moments previously bathed in a crisping, mind-splitting silence. Scrawled onto the carpet in bloody letters:

“The future awaits!”

A pit settled in his stomach. Shrilly shrieking from the sharp change, his shoes unready, Jack wheeled his frame around—quicker than a rush of water ebbing life from a match-flare. Mara rocked herself in a pool of tears, shuddering in anguish as strangers, casting gazes of inquiry, flitted by like wasps. She lifted her head doe-like, slowy. They stared at each other. Jack’s vein-popping struggle to wrench his pores shut, to stop the gushing waterfall of tears upon tears ceased immediately.

Two pairs of doleful eyes that once swam with the glint of the sun, stars and each other, now choke in the venomous tears of an impossible unreality.

“Good luck. I hope NYU treats you well.”

“Thanks. I hope it works out with you too, staying back home and everything.”