Passing Through | Lara Ameen

We’ve never met, but I wonder what it might be like to be your friend. Or maybe more than that.
It feels like I am just an observing participant, someone just passing through. I only see you three times and the last time is a dream.
The first time I see you, it’s at a slam poetry event in San Francisco.
The event is at a bar with performers crammed on a tiny stage. Music pulsing from tiny speakers, threading through the cluster of bodies and into the audience.
The air around me is stifling, perfumed with muggy sweat and the acrid stench of alcohol.
I sit in the back, sipping a Shirley Temple, auburn hair descending in wavy curls to my shoulders.
When it’s your turn to take the stage, the music stops. You approach the mic and speak with confidence. An unwavering cadence in your tone.
A lavender blouse fits snugly against your torso. A necklace with your name in gold-plated letters drapes across your collarbone. Your black hair twists in a braid down the center of your back.
The whole bar is enraptured by the gravitas of your presence.
But especially me.
When you finish, the ripples of applause engorge the space, echoing around me in discordant cacophony.
I clap along with them. I can’t look away from you, seduced by the lilt of your voice and something about your face, your eyes, your body. A barely-there glimmer, a translucent image.
The second time I see you, you’re getting on a BART train headed toward Oakland. Dressed in faded jeans and a loose fitted top splashed with cerise.
I flick the switch of my wheelchair’s control pad. It whirs to life, but I don’t follow, watching from a careful distance. Wrap chilled fingers around the joystick.
A swish and the doors close, trapping you behind the glass as the rapidly moving vehicle disappears into the black tunnel ahead.
I’m supposed to meet a friend for coffee in Berkeley in half an hour. I force myself to turn away.
I couldn’t tell you how much I enjoyed your poem that night at the bar. Swarms of people aren’t always kind to wheelchair-using folks. Treat us like we’re non-existent. I still wonder if someday you’ll notice me, but you’ve never looked in my direction.
The third and final time I see you, you’re too far from my reach. I can’t call out to you; my voice won’t carry that far. It seems like you’re getting farther and farther away now.
My breath fogs the glass as you pass by, walking in the opposite direction. Your lips are pursed in a smile and your head is thrown back in carefree laughter.
The siren of my dreams.
The ghost of my present.
Haunting me in wakefulness and slumber.
I still can’t reach you, but maybe I never can.
Never will.
The distance between us grows longer. Your phantom silhouette looms in the distance.
When I wake up the next morning, I wonder if you were ever real to begin with.

Lara Ameen is a screenwriter, novelist, short fiction writer, sensitivity/authenticity reader and holds a PhD in Education with a Disability Studies emphasis from Chapman University. She received an MFA in Screenwriting from California State University, Northridge. Her YA contemporary fantasy novel, SPAER, was awarded a disabled writers’ grant from Suffering the Silence, longlisted in Voyage YA’s First Chapters Contest and their Book Pitch Contest. A 2022 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow, 2022 Mentorship Matters TV Writing Program Finalist, and a 2022 NBC Launch TV Writing Program Finalist, she was a 2023 Screenwriting Mentee as part of 1in4 Coalition’s mentorship program for disabled screenwriters. She is a 2021 alum of the Tin House YA Workshop and 2021 and 2024 alum of the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in Prismatica Magazine, Disabled Voices Anthology, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, just femme & dandy, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and elsewhere. She made her traditional publishing debut as a contributor to the 2024 Lambda Literary finalist young adult multi-genre anthology, Being Ace, published by Page Street YA.