Hidden Moon

It began as all love stories do: our eyes met. Only it wasn’t some magical moment of catharsis where the world slows down and our heartbeats joined together as a single, matching beat and the music faded into that steady, synchronized rhythm and we were finally home after so much time swimming against the tide, trying desperately to reach the shore.

It was nothing like that.

You were there and I was there, and so was a friend we both knew. And so we shook hands the way strangers do when they are trying not to be strangers anymore, and we all got a table together at the bar. The conversation was nice and you were nice and I didn’t think much of it until I saw you again a few months later at a birthday party.

It all happened slowly after that.

There was no jolted, jumbled montage of our moments together as we grew closer, as we went from friends to lovers to whatever you’d call the thing that comes next, the highest point we could reach together. Love is not a succession of such moments. It is the tiny spaces in between the highlights that matter most. It is the times between sleeping and wakefulness; the breath before a plunge into the water. These are the things we never remember in our framed photographs and retold stories, but they are the patches of soil upon which all good things grow and bloom. We bloomed beautiful, a spring rose destined to last the winter.

We grew old together, and we still remembered to love each other, a thing so often forgotten with the passing of years and the weight of time’s burdens. But you and I, we loved each other the way the moon hangs in the sky even in daylight-- not always visible, but always there somewhere, hidden inside the blue.

Oh, how I wish this was the way our story went.

But Fate is not always kind to the hopeful, and even love cannot contend with the cold truth of an X-ray scan and an ugly black splotch at its center, spreading just fast enough to be one step ahead.

You never lost your hair the way it always seems to happen in the movies. There was barely time for that, anyway. Barely time for much of anything besides the tears and making the kind of plans we never wanted to and, of course, the completely inadequate ‘goodbye’ that never quite made its way past your lips. It rung so hollow in my chest I thought I’d follow you right down into the ground within the day. But I didn’t.

You are out of reach now, my little moon hiding up there in the sky. I think of you only between each blink, so it’s not as bad as it used to be. Time is cruel and where there was never enough of it with you, there is too much stretched out in front of me now, waiting to be gobbled up by a life I can’t imagine living without you beside me. Perhaps that is our cruelest gift: to know love only for as long as is allowed. To know yourself only by the way your reflection shifts in your lover’s pupils, and then, suddenly, to know nothing.

I think one day I will see you again, because to think anything else makes that blue sky blot black like the stain in your lungs that swallowed you up. I think one day I will be able to take a step forward, but today there is a wall stretched out before me, so vast and wide that there is no way around it. Today, even breathing is a tedious, heavy chore. But tomorrow, I will open my eyes and I will roll from beneath the covers of my empty bed, and I will try again.

Tomorrow, I may even catch sight of the moon, peeking out from a pale morning sky.