This is a story, like so many others as of late, about being in a park, alone, looking curiously at people as they move in unfamiliar gravities. This, much like many others is about a girl in a black dress sitting in the newness of the summer sun. She sat, with her feet pointed towards the other. She sat, waiting for something, or someone, to save her from the startling revelation that life had continued while she was alone in a room, with the smaller movements, internal, as her only company. This place is full of large motions, the actions of people like the movements of particles around a glowing nucleus of early summer. She sat a lonely vigil on the periphery of that vortex, watching as the holding of hands, and the playing of children, worked as a clockwork reminder of all the things that never happened. She sat as stone, book in lap, pretending to read; pretending to belong, though she sees this as visiting, as stepping into some unfamiliar world in which sunlight is comfort and emotions are functional. The table soon grows uncomfortable, the park goers start to lose their substance, and she stands on trembling fawn legs, to wonder off towards something else totally unknown. And the park goer’s noise moves from tangible, to echo, to memory. The tapping of feet on sidewalk became the staccato heartbeat of her new life. She walks, with feet pointed towards nowhere in particular, and I’m left looking at emptying tables and the ringing echos of all the stories laid bare in summer observance.