Cut

Chapter 1

You say it's up to me to do the talking you lean forward please deposit tissues in front of me and your black leather chair growing like a living thing like the cow it used to be for somebody killed it and turned it in to the chair in a shrinks office in a loony bin.
Your stockinged legs make a shushing sound as you cross them. "Can you remember how it started?" You say.
I remember exactly.

It was at the last cross country meet right around 4 mile mark everybody had passed me just like the week before and the week before that. Everybody except a girl from the other team we were the only ones left in the last stretch of the course, The part that winds through the woods and comes out behind the school. Our shadows passed along the ground slantwise; slowly they merged then her shadow past mine.
The soles of her sneakers swan up and down in front of me, first one then the other a grid of ridged the spelled out the upside down name of the shoe company. My steps fill in the time with hers. My feet went where her feet had just been. she leaned in and around the corner I leaned in and around the corner.
She breathed, I breathed
Then she was gone.
I couldn't even picture her anymore but what scared me really scared me was that I couldn't remember the moment when I stoped seeing her. and I knew then that if I couldn't see her no one could see me.
Sounds from the track meet flowed by. A whistle trilling. Muffle applause, the weak sputtering of gloved hands clapping. I was still running but now I was off the path headed away from the finish line pass the cars in the parking lot, The flagpole and the "home of the loins" sign. Past the new houses and the park until somehow I was at the entrance to our development.