Wilshire Blvd.

2025, nearly ten months in

Every morning, when I open the door of the building where I work and walk into the faux-marbled lobby, it’s only a few steps before a bug skitters across my path. It’s about an inch and flat, a scale with a hundred tiny feet. I believe it’s the same bug about as much as I’m the same person stepping through the same doorway into the same lobby of the same building. I’m never startled when I see it; in fact, I look down at the floor at the very moment that it scrambles toward the baseboard. After you, I want to say (in very tiny script). Step, skitter, pause. The day opens, a crack in time, a pulse. I think about naming the bug. I think about lives that meet and miss. That guy with the square jaw, walking his bike, who crossed my path every Monday and Wednesday as I walked to Dey Hall on the campus of UNC in the 80s. The ex-boyfriends and lovers and husbands. Maybe we both died last week and nobody told us, I think. Maybe this is heaven, I whisper to the bug. More likely, the waiting room, he suggests. It’s the second to last day of October, I whisper. We’re nearly ten months in with this ray-geme at the helm. He disappears into the marble. I’ll see him Monday. Same doorway into the same lobby of the same building. It’ll be the same bug about as much as I’ll be the same person. I’ll be a crone with fingers that itch to claw out some eyes.