Say what you mean, tell me I'm right.

We are living her memories, the few that remain.

The scene opens with green lawns, and the buzz of suburban summer. I can't feel the heat, but we enter into her home and hear expected the buzz of air-conditioning. We progress through the house which is both small, and welcoming. At the back of the house we come to a tiny, but well-kept room.Our narrator informs us that we are in the bedroom she lived-in and loved as a child.

That memory fades. We are sitting in an alley, a young girl rocks back and forth, crouched down beside us. We do not linger here. A group of students dressed in the uniform of our school run past, looking for her. We say nothing, and turn to leave. We are her classmates, my friends and I, and are enrolled in her private high school. It is an exclusive trust-fund-kids school and reeks of enui and booze.

We are in a dimly lit hall; students mull around the dance-floor while the chaperons busy themselves, ignoring the students. We wait here, choosing to stick around, having nothing better to do.

The dance hall fades. The world around us goes languid, no single picture floating to the surface but rather choosing to slither close and then float away without being caught.

We do not reach out to anything, the images of her memory are fuzzy, incorporeal, and changing. Slowly the drift amongst the thoughts and dates becomes a flow, and then a rush, far and above our control or comprehension. Memories flash before us relentlessly, and in a blur of parties and life events without center or control. Graduations, and boys, dinners and cocktails. Interviews and men, more men in a parade of suits and ties, fashionable haircuts and fast cars, none of them taking us places we truly wish to be.

The memory roulette stops, the images focus.

He stands amidst a clutch of well-dressed and appropriately cynical twenty-somethings. The world around us sharpens. The woman now, young and confident strides forward to meet him.

We turn away, fold in on ourselves and descend into gossip-whispers. We know she'll love him, and we know he'll leave her. She'll be broken and alone, and we know this before she does, but are helpless to stop it. They will spin off into the world and lose themselves in the things from which they came, cheapening the experience as they go in grand and irreproachable way. We are shades, and she-- the flesh and blood-- ventures on to her certain end, at his hands.

The night flicks around us,consciousness tearing at the edges of reality.

Oh our poor child and the follies of youth, we bemoan, as we sip our gin and laugh.