Oracle

Or wishing well, whatever few things you thumb through on the internet when you should be going to bed. Pages with pictures of people you miss, people you'd like to sleep with, people you don't know. Flipping out coins, staring, measuring the parameters of yourself against the traced lines of friends and strangers.

Their mouths live. Sometimes they burp and keep on talking obliviously and it's adorable. Sometimes the lines solidify, in scratches, in being awed by how beautiful she is when she cries, in drawing pictures of unspeakable things all over your friend's homework. In graduating. In seeing his head shoved down so it doesn't hit the top of the police car.

But the tracery - of gameface pictures, of names of things, of glib glibness - is the lattice empty? Maybe not. A bookmark of time spent with various presences. This person you miss because the words "I love you" actually came out of them and they meant it and sometimes it helps so much. This person you want to sleep with even though you know better. This person you don't know but think about telegraphing because their names match yours.

You can look at the thing, make wishes, construct the future, see yourself reflected back in dim lines. Because finally, you thumb through your own names, your own pictures, your own carefully assembled nexus in the web. And then you see all the points coalesce into what you made for other people, truth (both the happy whole of the part and the ugly concealments) wriggles somewhere between your diaphragm and your kidney, and you think,

"Really?"

Then you drop another penny in the water.