Solstice

It may have been the whiskey the princess and I consumed after he boarded the plane. Maybe the parting words he whispered before stepping on the escalator, "You always take my jokes seriously and laugh when I'm telling the truth-what more could I want?" All these tiny sub-plots shacking up together until our destinies were a tangled mess of co-dependent probabilities.

We were made for loss, the three of us. The opposite ends of the globe conspired for eight weeks to fuse our skins until geographical impossibilities ripped them into separate humans again. A line of happy paper-dolls forced to face the world as flimsy individuals. The universe never holds its breath.

So we ricocheted back across oceans, finding places where the booze ran free and our lungs recognized the air. Still, the ache. Memory became an angel that tortured and sensitized.

The princess faded like Sleeping Beauty, letting silence lull her into a dreamland where everything floated in suspended animation.

He and I swung across the internet hoping to inspire some kind of apocalypse. Nothing moved.

We were relentless romantics, yelling through a translator that worked in binary.

When actual death occurred, there was little to say. All that beauty had bled its way into the fluid suspending our cells. We rose together and we fell, loss ebbing like the slow seconds sliding their way through bone and dream.