He looked at me once and then turned away, facing the window.
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at where I happen to be standing.
"You see, Abram."
He said my name walking toward the glass, not looking at anything but the trees. The green light moved across his face in soft, shifting bands. His shoulders were set the way a man sets them when the only audience left is the future.
I moved through the space between us and put myself directly in front of him.
He walked through me and stopped at the window. The air of his passage left nothing behind—no temperature, no displacement. Only the quiet certainty that I was not here to him in any way that mattered.
"Can you see me?"
"I know you've seen a great deal by now. And I know you're judging me for it."
He wasn't answering. He was talking into an empty room, on a day two decades before I'd be old enough to hear any of it. His reflection sat faint in the glass, layered over the moving leaves outside.
