that was it all for the best?

She turns to him and he sighs and smiles, reaches for the camera at his hip. Whirrrrrr-click. The Nikon flashes in her face and her look of surprise is permanent now, a part of the record. He only sees the world after it's gone, after the camera has captured it. I guess he's just a few seconds behind the rest of us, like any good historian, and his entire persona captures it. He dresses stylishly, but, with a certain sense of dilation, like he bought all his clothes year ago, all on one day, so it's not out of date but just a bit faded. His smile and laughs and gestures all come half-a-second too late and are always preceded by the whirrrr-click. She pulls at a forelock and wonders what this must look like to him.


She in white, him in grey. A beautiful couple, they all said, even the bitter last-minute-invite, with his scuffed loafers and tried-to-quit-but-not-really cigarettes. The bride sat with this sad man for a few minutes outside of her tents, appropriating his bad habits. He smiled and tapped the cylinder against his slacks. They didn't say anything, but when he was done, he stood and extended his hand. She grabbed it and made as it to get up, but instead, he shook her hand and walked off towards the beach. She watched as he walked off and turned a corner and she only felt the urge to follow him a little bit. When people would tell stories later, they said he probably went to the bar at the end of the pier and probably got too drunk to even remember their was a ceremony, but, she imagined he took off his loafers. Stretched his calves. And dissolved into the sand.


Him in black, she in white. The man made his triumphant return from the earth and the husband looked tight and sad. They stood next to each other, before the casket, and the loss tied them together inextricably, feeling it like no-one else in the pavillion did, because they both lost her before their time. They had just picked out a nice place together, a dog. They were whispers of children even. For the man, they barely exchanged feelers. He was scared, then, and ran and ran. They called it a foolish prelude, when they called it anything. But the man and the husband knew different, because they could both stand there before her and feel equally in the right, that they both deserved their post to watch over her.


Him in dark red, the man in black. He slipped out of his seat, patting his mother slightly on the shoulder. He died in a car crash, coming back from Connecticut. His brother was being ordained in the Church and they were both driving back to the ancestral home in New Hampshire when a semi-truck turned into them and killed him instantly. The brother survived, "miraculously" some would say afterward. The man just happened to be in New England at the time and heard of his death through a friend that knew them all, that even knew them when the man and she were briefly in the same picture. She told him to go, to show support. No-one there knew him, but, he knew the person he was supporting was lone gone anyway. She died from a fall. The top of a cliff in Argentine, she lost her footing and tumbled. Her body was found floating, hair astray, in a clear pool of snow runoff basin, 2000 feet below. The man was in Boston at the time, but, heard the news almost immediately. When his friends would talk about that night, because he never told them, they would say he left abruptly. The strangers that knew him briefly after that would say he came abruptly and was a sturdy drinker, a lover of people and a genuinely hearty spirit. No man would ever say that about the man again.