text: The tension from what would be their final fight grew and boiled as they shouted, until it felt like a metal rod shoved into both of their chests, keeping them planted in place, tortured, unable to walk away, and then he said some words he couldn’t take back and twisted it, and she did the same, and then they both twisted further, and finally the rod snapped in two. They turned and walked away from each other, him first, then her, the sounds of the city muffled by the haze of their anger. The only thing they could hear was their footfalls, asynchronous on the hard sidewalk, her heels clacking, his sneakers scuffing. Pick up your fucking *feet* when you walk, she thought, and she turned around to tell him that, and then she stopped and was silent. She watched his funny, loping gait as he walked away from her, and realized she had not turned to tell him that. She had turned to see if he would look back at her. For a second she stood, frozen, waiting for him to turn, trying to will it to happen telepathically. If he would just *turn* they could be together again--it felt like if she just believed it enough it would happen. Didn’t some mental connection between lovers exist? But he didn’t turn. He continued to walk in his off-kilter way, and, trying to conceal her hurt with a crisp show of grace and defiance, she pivoted on her heel and strode forward. Her sharp footsteps broke his focus on angrily walking forwards, and before he realized fully what he was doing he stopped and turned and watched her. Now *he* was caught watching her, waiting for her to turn. If he yelled it would be cheating. Any attempt to draw her attention destroyed the point entirely. He needed her to turn, and see that he had turned too, and they would know that they both loved each other, and everything could go back to the way it was. But she didn’t turn. Her sundress swished back and forth as she walked away, one foot directly in front of the other as if she was walking a tightrope, and she showed no sign of responding to his desperate mental pleas. She seemed to be accelerating. He awkwardly bent down and pretended to pick up his keys, just in case she saw him, and then spun around and walked away, faster, the suppressed pain in his chest spurring him on, his only goal now to escape. She came to the crosswalk. The walk sign was illuminated. She knew that this was the point of no return and once more, she turned and looked at him, now small in her vision, threatening to be swallowed by the city. He didn’t turn, and so she did, and then he reached his crosswalk and turned to her but she was already across and away, obscured by a bus. The distance between their backs grew and grew as they both fast-walked in a straight line away from each other, trying to forget, trying to justify why they left, trying to understand why the other hadn’t turned around, wishing they hadn’t been so weak. Both of them, in sync without knowing it, became determined to never look back again, to keep their head down and walk in a straight line until they reached some endless ocean that would swallow them. Their paces increased. In that massive, ever-expanding space behind them, something began to grow. With each step he and she took, a new doppelganger of each of them was created, directly behind them, facing the opposite direction. One by one, the doppelgangers ran backwards towards the center, where the two lovers had started their journey outwards. He and she both heard the footsteps of their hundreds of thousands of copies, sounding almost endless, behind them. They both of them wrote it off as a trick of their imagination, trying to get them to turn around again, and they continued forward with new determination even as the sound of sprinting feet behind them grew exponentially. The first of their doppelgangers met each other in the middle, exactly where the real versions of them had first turned from each other. The doppelgangers leapt into one another's arms and began to kiss. Then they were slammed into by another set of copies, who groped for one another as if they were in pitch blackness, and then another pair reached the middle and began to claw at each other's eyes with hatred. Every second a new pair of doppelgangers reached the middle and fell into love or hate or embrace or murder with the other--they began to pile up, their bodies twisted and wrapped around each other, until there were millions of them, fighting or loving or looking into each others eyes. The pile of copies grew in height and width like a tsunami. The writhing bodies ascended up the sides of buildings, breaking windows, flooding into apartments, destroying cars and buses with their weight. He and She both heard the noise of it, but they couldn’t look, they had to keep walking forward, they knew that they wouldn’t see what they wanted. Behind them the endless copies of their bodies grew until it looked as if they had somehow become a towering organism in their own right, one massive living body made from millions of tiny ones. The body of bodies loomed over the streets and plunged everything into shadow, until finally, the whole massive stack of them, almost a mile across, tipped on its side, crushing buildings, leveling entire neighborhoods. Every hope and dream and future and fight contained in that enormous pile released all of its destructive potential, and the city was engulfed in dust and fury and chaos--all the doppelgangers screamed, the millions of copies of her holding onto the millions of copies of him tightly as they fell, and thousands of city-dwellers screamed in fear and agony from below, being consumed and swept away by the massive ocean of squirming, identical couples. The noise grew to an unspeakable level, and the dust reached out for him and her, and the screeching of millions melded together, sounding as if New York was some sort of giant monster that was just waking up and realizing it couldn’t move, buried under buildings and concrete. Finally she stopped, and then he stopped, the noise somehow still growing, threatening to pop their eardrums. They were about two miles apart now. Exactly at the same time, in sync without ever knowing it, they whirled around and looked at the stretch of street behind them--and saw nothing there at all. All was quiet and still--the other person nowhere to be seen. They both stared at the empty street for as long as they could, hoping to will the other person into existence. Finally, after an eternity of staring and silence, both of them turned back the way they were going, and took another step apart.