To live outside the places that time erodes. There must be a crack somewhere deep enough to hold how their eyes meet in desire. A way to flatten themselves, unnoticed, backs against the wall while everything around them becomes old. Ends. Decays.
It feels like the trickery of holding her baby for the first time, seduced by a lullaby of hope. Her father’s death already in motion. The sting of birth, the echo of death. If we truly believed in the ending, would we ever begin?
“You could be the love of my life,” she hears herself say to him after two margaritas on the warm windy patio of the Mexican restaurant.
The words repeat themselves, in a slow cruel voice at 2am. What was she thinking? She knows better. It’s not so much him, she realizes, but her desperation to find one thing that escapes this beast intent on silencing animation from beloved cells we call home.