The Palm of Your Hand

Maya traced the lifeline on Elias's palm, her finger lingering where the skin was calloused from years of carrying other people's burdens. They were sitting on the balcony of his apartment, the city humming below them like a living thing.

"You're going to live a long life," she said softly, though the line on his palm was broken, fragmented. A lie, or maybe just optimism dressed as prophecy.

Elias pulled his hand away, reaching for his **iphone** on the glass table. The screen lit up his face in pale blue, highlighting the circles under his eyes. "Work email," he muttered, already disappearing into that familiar trance where his presence was there and not there simultaneously, a modern **zombie** in a button-down shirt.

Maya watched him, remembering when they'd first met three years ago at a coffee shop in Chicago. He'd been reading Camus and actually looked up when she entered the room. Now, she couldn't remember the last time they'd made love without his phone vibrating on the nightstand, couldn't remember the last conversation that wasn't interrupted by a notification, a deadline, the endless urgency of jobs that would replace them both within six months if they stopped running.

"You forgot your **hat**," she said, touching the gray beanie he'd left inside. It was cold on the balcony, late October in the city, their relationship weathering its own kind of winter.

"I'm fine," he said, thumb still moving across the screen, responding to someone who wasn't her, who would never matter more than this moment should have.

Maya stood up, wrapping her cardigan tighter. "I started taking that **vitamin** D supplement again," she said, apropos of nothing, or perhaps everything. "The doctor said I might be deficient. That's why I've been so tired."

Elias nodded absently, still typing. "That's good, babe."

"I'm not tired because of a deficiency," she said, her voice catching. "I'm tired because I'm lonely. I'm lonely right next to you."

He looked up then, really looked at her, and for a moment she saw the man she'd fallen in love with, the one who used to trace the lines on her palm and promise her everything. "Maya..."

"Don't," she said, pressing her palm against the glass door. "Just—don't."

She left him there with his phone and his emails and the city lights flickering like dying stars. Some lifelines, she realized, weren't meant to be read. They were meant to be broken.