System Decay is always present.

We’re sitting beside each other on the balcony, a parade of faces streaming by below us, the sounds of commerce rising up in the hours before noon. This is Paris as we'd like to remember it, summer time, champagne for breakfast, and predictable and contrived things like croissants and cheeses and fruit salads on the table in front of us. The cobblestone streets are still wet from a brief thunderstorm the night before, and the humidity isn't so bad yet that the museums are appealing. We’ve seen them all, anyway, twice. 

She’s still got her makeup on from the night before, mascara running down her cheeks, black streaks marking where she'd been crying about something that made her happy, some moment when the fireworks and the light show made her recall something poignant and then it was the moon and the stars, and maybe even a little bit of the wine that culminated in an emotional peak, some moment that I was both excited and frightened to share with her, another in the many that have been permanently etched into my memories. Most of her amber eye shadow's been rubbed away through sleep, sleep that, last night, I hoped would never arrive at the end of a day that I never wanted to end, as my leg fell out of the side of the bed, a bed too small for a couple not in the mood for sharing with each other, but we were far from that couple, we were incapable of being that couple in those days of Paris and London and Amsterdam.

She’s looking at her nails, like she always does, and I know that she wants to bite them, even though she's already chewed them down to the quick. We’re young and we're traveling abroad and she's nervous, and I love her more than I could vocalize.

"Times change," she says, and I light another cigarette, spinning the Zippo around in my hand a few times, partially because I like the way that it feels and partially because I feel the need to do it for effect. It’s more of an observation on her part than anything else, I'm used to these kinds of statements.

I stare out over the balcony ledge. There’s the Eiffel tower, where just hours ago we climbed all the way to the top, stopping at the different observation decks for photos. My legs were tired and I blamed them when my knees buckled on the uppermost level, when really all that I was hiding was my irrational fear of falling. We’re always falling, I know, life's a series of rises and falls, of crests and peaks, but that's all hypothetical stuff, it's all in your head, figurative images to describe complicated relationships and situations. When you're really faced with the potential for free fall, no matter how irrational it may be, something stupid happens like your knees buckling, and you make an embarrassing drop that you hope people interpret as awe, as wonder, that you've been taken with the beauty of the city around you.

Of course, she knew the truth, right as it happened. She always could tell when I was covering something up and what was going on inside of my head, especially when it really mattered, insisting that the connection we had was more than just the remnants of our shared link that first day, so far away, back in my kitchen. I wasn't sure, I never really could be, but you have to trust people sometimes, and she'd given me more than a few reasons to trust her (as well as completely distrust her, but there's a duality in everything, and you've got to pick a side).