A succession of shrill rings jolted Julie from her mundane dream. In it she was obsessively trying to find a perfect peach in the produce aisle at Wegmans.
Her left eye barely opened to a slit as she reached for the phone, put it to her ear and uttered, “Yeah?”
“I’ve done it.” Whispered a gruff voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey, is this Dimitri? My friend who lives just down the hall but I haven’t seen in months?”
The line went silent.
“I’m sorry, Julie, I’ve been really busy. I can’t explain it, you’ll have to come down and see for yourself.”
“Have you been drinking again? What is it you’ve done?” Julie mumbled as she rubbed her eyes and propped herself up in bed.
“I haven’t had as much as a glass of merlot in weeks. Please, just come down.” Dimitri pleaded.
Julie grunted as she jammed the phone down onto the cradle, flung open the covers, and crawled out from under them. She tied the belt on her white terry cloth robe, squinting at the hallway’s painfully bright lights as she closed her apartment door.
As she made her way down the hall to Dimitri’s door her legs felt stiff and heavy. She was growing concerned with what she might find on the other side of that door. He was a completely different person since his fiancee had gone missing a little over a year ago.
It was obvious to everyone that he and Crystal were crazy in love. They were the kind of couple who completed one another. For the first few months Dimitri was so consumed with finding her that he lost his dream job with Google. Another month passed and he had gone full-fledged recluse.
Julie wrapped gently at his door with one knuckle and pressed her right eye to the peephole hoping for some forewarning. She heard the click of the deadbolt as Dimitri quickly opened the door. A wall of stench hit her as she crossed the threshold so sour that it nearly made her wretch. Dimitri’s face was ashen. It was as though he’d aged ten years since she last saw him.
His eyes stared through her, he began speaking desperately in rapid clips.
“It took so long...
because all I had
to work with
was a few voicemails...
a handful...of pictures...I found.”
Dimitri clicked the button on his mouse. A beam of light cut through the middle of the dark and cluttered room and a three-dimensional image of Crystal stood before them. The hologram was so lifelike that Julie’s first inclination was to run up and embrace Crystal but shortly after she wanted to slap her across the face and demand an explanation as to where the hell she’d been for so long.
Crystal was smiling coyly in the sunshine as a light breeze tossed her auburn hair. She reached in the deep pocket of her sundress, took out a square of paper, unfolded it, and began to speak…
“Level me
with one glance,
as you look over your shoulder
and smile sweetness with your eyes.”
Dimitri silently mouthed the words to the poem as Crystal recited,
“Our years are a dance only just begun.
Yet I know in some distant time when the days grow short
I will chuckle with content as we sip our tea
with a dust of a million miles on our feet
and I know this life was lived complete, my Dear.”
Julie carefully stepped over a tangle of wires to embrace Dimitri as his tears soaked her shirt through.
“She wrote that for me, Julie. This took me months of programming but this is the precise moment I fell in love with her. Now I never have to let her go. Code is poetry too you know, now she’s made of it.”
~ Eric Vance Walton ~
(Gif sourced from Giphy.com)
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