In My Heart is the Memory

There are short breaths and words that could be goodbyes but aren’t always intended to be.

And this is how a love can be something like a universe:

-You stop short of telling her you love her, because courage runs through your fingers not your tongue but she knows now, she knows. And it feels heavy despite the light freckles you count across her cheeks before meeting her eyes. Would the universe still be beautiful if it had no colour? You know that she would still be.

-She tells you she hopes that one day you’ll both owe the world nothing more, and it sounds like she hopes one day, together, you can just be. And the earth and the moon spin around a burning star, when will that owe them nothing more?

-Her hair turns golden in the light and you start to wonder where it was that the sun came from again.

-She kisses you and this time she gives you her everything and she doesn’t hate you like she could have done and something explodes within your chest, firing through your blood like a meteor storm.

-You breathe her in before you send it back, send with it whispers that echo. And she’s heard you say that before but interpreted it differently, thought of it like a battle.“Will you take a life with me?”This time it means stay, this time it means with you. Spend this life, choose this one of all the possible outcomes.

-And in that moment they all merge together into one, hazy moments in time, one where you never meet, one where you walk away, one where you don’t. So maybe it is destiny, maybe it’s fate, maybe it’s something of the gods, or maybe it’s none of that. Either way, planets align and atoms collide until she takes this life with you in a clenched fist.