Attenuation or Separation

She gave me about an hour to think about that earring, worn first day in what I assumed was a new job, then Fate shoved her chair back and rolled into my line of sight. "I'm already bored of the clicking over there. Do they have a coffee bar on the floor?"

"One floor down. It's a good walk when you need to think." I ignored her, but she rolled into the cubicle anyway. I had to scoot over while she looked at my photos and the art and glib comments taped under the shelves. I had scavenged in my roommate's cube before she left and some of those things were hers. Fate picked up one photo and looked at it for some time.

"You're leaving them in the light to fade." She showed me a photo, where a small oval in the corner was white. A faded aureole crept outward from it, a permanent sun fuzz across my friends and I. She moved it back into the corner, bringing forward a photo that I didn't recognize.

"Let this one pick up some of the light. He won't notice much difference." It was picture of a blonde friend of mine from college. I'd never taken or seen this picture, so I assumed I'd swept it in the box along with the rest of the desk stuff I'd been planning to send back. Why would I have kept this? His white-blonde hair and white shirt against a white wall, the droop of his head and his smirk...it was a New Wave picture that must have been taken in high school. Before we ever knew of him, among friends we'd never shared him with. Had we taken as good care of him as they had? Was he back among them now or among yet another set of friends, camped in a cube and being dilligent...not smart, no longer cool? She was right, better this fade before he had a chance to compare then and now.

I shuddered against the chill of the vent above me. Working at this angle could be like running a low grade fever for days on end. Fate stood and shoved her chair out of the narrow space beside me. "Did I say something? Would you prefer that I not touch your things? Some people are funny that way. Let's go get coffee and forget about it. You can tell me how looking at the flowers downstairs gets you in so deep that you get saddled with me."