Manifest Well

Manifest Well

I enter Zack's house and pause to see the girl with long dreadlocks and a skittish smile trying to pet Berty. She stays near enough to Dan's personal space to assure the viewer why she is present, but far enough away to assert her autonomy. There is not physical contact between the couple, but it seems almost an irrelevant distinction. On some astral level, they are pawing at one another the way Berty does with her toys.

I say to Dan, keeping my voice to a stage whisper, "You manifest well." I had joked more than once and with evident good reason that Lora was nothing more than a pernicious Charles Bonnet Syndrome hallucination, the obligatory Canadian girlfriend no one ever sees that is conjured up to assuage friends and classmates that one is indeed popular, if only with fictional Canucks. We did not actually think that Lora was a figment of Dan's imagination, though I believe we wished it more than once given the violently sporadic nature of their relationship. Zack thinks that Dan adores her because of her prodigious musical skill - a trait I have not witnessed in any capacity and therefore cannot speak to - and is therefore willing to ignore that she is every bit the tortured teenager artist with all of the solipsism and narrow focus that implies. Just a few weeks before, Dan and Lora had a blow up where he called her on the fact that she had asked him to her show to hang out with him afterward, then lied about ditching him to spend time with a different boy because she could.

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