Terminal

over years, the black one and the white one drifted apart
and those around them decided the two of them must be over. But they
were only lost,
two solid-colored marbles in a sack of agates and steelys, unable to face
one another by the simple fact that they could not find one another.
Random searches into
a gene pool stretching into millions of variations proved fruitless, and the

black one and the white one soon decided things must come to an end. Apart
from one another, things didn’t seem as clear as they once had. Lost,

each found him/herself searching for that one aesthetically pleasing face
finding it in one disappointing scenario after another, groping into
the night with strangers that seemed familiar once, but soon, usually
after the
sun came up, what had been there in the face had disappeared with the
night. Apart,
the black one and the white one suffered great indignities, lost

too much precious time that should have been spent facing
forward instead of backwards. In time, of course, these stories
eventually climax into

them finding one another again, they might bump into each other on the
train, or the bus, or crossing some random intersection, feel the apart
that had been rotting inside suddenly disappear, lost
in a sea of recognition and instant familiarity, what made us fall
apart? not facing
the fact that maybe they didn’t actually belong together, not looking into

the things that had gone wrong in the past, that drove us apart in the
first place
and why I feel as lost when I’m with you as without you, not facing
these things, just leaving all this up to you.

Holly Day is a journalism instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with fiction and poetry publications most recently appearing in Big Hammer, The Long Islander, and Darkling. Her most recent book publications are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and a biography of Columbian pop star Shakira.

Find more by Holly Day in the Author Index.

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