Read Online Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall - Free Book Online

incoming text message from Tina that read, You Alive? I realized it was our four-year anniversary today, and both Josh and I had forgotten.
    A week later, at Starbucks on Spadina, a jump below Queen, I saw my random crush. She was this little tomboy thing, blonde, messy-haired, always dropping something, always in a hurry. We’d progressed to nodding and smiling at each other, since we clearly had the same work schedule. She always ordered a tall green tea, and I was always two double soy lattes for Tina and me.
    For some reason, seeing the random crush made me smile to myself as I walked across the street to work.
    Tina noticed. “What’s with the grin, goofy?” She rooted through her oversized purse for a pack of cigarettes while we stood on the polished wood floors of 401 Richmond, a beautiful building filled with galleries and offices for arts organizations, film festivals and magazines.
    Tina and I worked on the fourth floor. We were waiting for Josh to bring the video projector down in the elevator. The lobby smelled like lemon, not in a Lemon Pledge way, but like the citronella lotion I used to wear at summer camp to ward off mosquitoes. The smell filled me with calm every morning when I came into work.
    I was co-coordinating a project. Somehow my life had become a series of related projects. Tina and I were deciding who got grant money for a Super-8 film project, and we were watching the submissions at my house to narrow down the shortlist. The more I got involved in organizing festivals or teaching how-to-edit-film workshops, the less art I was actually making. But my inspiration had been dry anyway.
    I rushed to the front door to prop it open as Josh marched through the lobby from the elevators, face eclipsed by the giant projector. He had come right from work, still in uniform, to help us out and drive us home. It could still make me feel something, that shade of blue.
    I jumped ahead of him down the front steps of the building to our car, which was parked illegally outside the pizza joint. I popped the trunk and held it open so he could wedge the projector in between a bulk case of mineral water and the spare tire. Everyone stared at Josh when he was in his uniform. He’d learned not to care, but it weirded me out still.
    We watched Tina bike through traffic ahead of us on Richmond Street, pounding her fist on the hood of a Beck taxi before darting through the intersection. Josh shook his head at her, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, kept time with the Modest Mouse song. We sang the chorus while stopped at Bathurst behind a streetcar. For some reason being stopped behind a streetcar always seemed like some sort of divine injustice. Patience. I needed so much more of it.
    Josh put his hand on my leg. I turned and for a moment saw him the way a stranger might. I tried to picture us together in five years. Who would we be?
    After lighting a cigarette and narrowly avoiding collision with another Beck taxi, Josh told me he had got an additional job, that he’d been selected to be part of a national team of emergency personnel specially trained for disasters. You know those TV commercials that ask, “Do you have a 72-hour plan for your family should a disaster strike?” Well, Josh would be sent to the nerve centre of whatever disaster actually ensued.
    A few months ago he’d worked like crazy on the application. “Can you believe it?” he said now. “The competition was really stiff.”
    â€œCongratulations, baby!” I said.
    â€œWe start training next week. I’ll be gone for the weekend.”
    I pictured myself stretched out on the sofa, doing my nails and drinking cocktails, the whole house to myself.
    I couldn’t do his job; I wouldn’t be able to handle all those final moments, the blood and panic. Josh is the perfect personality for it. He doesn’t freak out. When he’s at work, even if he is secretly bored or thinking about