Svetlana + Belmont

Hiding in a Field of Lamps

It wasn't Chicago's skyline and it wasn't like those e-Postcards you used to torture me with from London, but at least LA was a puddy world we'd formed together with our own hands (and joint life movie software).  LA became our historical amnesia where I wasn't a synth-mixologist anymore and you weren't a practicing cybersecurity expert either (not technically).  In this hot and dirty and hyped and fast city, we were just victims of our own creation, defining ourselves in every singularity, in every recreation, in every new performance.  I'll always hate Hollywood for being so damn loud, depressing, and full of the saddest holographic Marvel Cosplayers the world has ever seen.  LACMA is different.  I remember the last time we came here with our pockets full of old EMW's we'd found in an old briefcase on the LA Metro Clipper, buying homeless people four-course Self-Heating TV Dinners from a food hovertruck in South Park, drinking overpriced O-Sangria and synth-sake in Little Tokyo, taking a driverless taxi to Mid-wilshire.  I don’t know why I agreed to meet you in LA twenty years later after we last saw each other when I have a wife and kids in Oak Park all watching Bad Boy blaze its course towards earth on SFC2 and waiting for the world to explode into brimstone and lye and medi-gel shrapnel but I’m here now, in the same city I once followed you to back when you were doing research and I couldn't live without your smell.  You're holding my hand now and smiling as we walk slowly through the lamps and I'm looking at you with tears in my eyes because I’m truly happy for the first time since I got married (which, of course, also makes me feel like a complete shitbag about myself that I’ve abandoned my family to be with the only woman I’ve ever loved.  Please forgive me, kids, for abandoning you and erasing my archive of family screenshots in the EMOS library.  It's just that, I need to free up a few zettabytes of virtual HD space for my new—and final—memories.  I've set viewing options to private and turned off my Satellite Locator app with a flick of my wrist, so you never need to know I'm alive or happy.  I think that's only fair to all of you).