By now she would be on the road. There are certain future events that unfold into the present, and, we, knowing that they will happen, still respond with the unpredictability of a human heart. We feel like we understand other people so well when we have not a singular idea who we ourselves really are. In other people’s minds we are infinitely less complex, rounded around the edges, adjectives strewn together on a page. We are stories told in past tense across restaurant tables, we are vague references in dimly lit bars. We are whispered in different names to different people, strangers who become strangers who tell strangers about our lives. We are shaped into the lines of language, the brush stroke of an abstract painting, the ashes of a forgotten cigarette. We are “that one guy who that did that one thing… oh, what was his name?” We are neighbors and partners and frenemies, that weird, anti-social artist who mostly stayed in his apartment. We are a name and face on a driver’s license, expired and folded and weathered from accidental laundry cycles. We are the love of their lives, were the love or their life, the one they will never forget, the one they will never call again or add as a friend on facebook. We are deleted from phone books and crossed out of high school year book pictures, we are the name that follows various curse words and screaming threats, a beer bottle thrown across a club. We are the one, the only one, the one whose name is tattooed across years and years of memories. We are embroidery-threaded cliches that hang on our grandmother’s walls. We are unthreaded cocoons, unwinged butterfly kisses, sleeping sighs and sentimental thank-you cards bookmarking short-story collections by our beds. We are thank-you’s and thank-you’s and I-love-you’s and I’m-sorry’s—I’m-so-sorry-I-will-never-leave-you-again’s, even if those words are never spoken. We are late night calls and last minute good-bye’s, we are awkward acquaintances that nod heads across a crowded room. We are coworkers humming the same song, planning our lunches and forgetting to return phone calls. We are still in their hearts, even if that heart is pounding across a crowded Chinese subway train, headed even further from our embrace. We are alone. We are alone even when the future had promised a different place, a place where we try and try and never give up, because we want to understand that person more than we understand ourselves.