Winter Wind

The wind blows through the construction site, turning hanging sheets of plastic into pregnant sails whose booming thunder echoes up and down the empty streets. I stand on the stoop and watch them expand and contract, the hollow cracks keeping time with the beating of my heart. “Were you waiting long?” you say as you step outside. “All my life,” I say. “Oh good, not too long.”

No, not too long at all.

We go to meet the dinosaurs, our grinning pals whose eyes are both empty and wise. Beneath that sightless gaze we walk in silence, our fingers entwined in the only conversation necessary, the conversation about everything and nothing that started the day we met, the greatest conversation of my life. Our footsteps echo in the empty halls, and I swear I can hear the rumblings of distant thunder, or is it just the wind sweeping through the sheets? I don't know, and when you look at me I forget to care because I'm lost in the memory of the first time you looked at me, really looked at me and saw me: a frightened child looking for a friend, the mirror image of yourself.