The Last Time You Fall in Love

You find yourself in a library where all the books are missing their last pages. The shelves curve impossibly upward, disappearing into a ceiling that might not exist. (Yes, you're in a story now—but then again, weren't you always?)

Footsteps echo behind you, but they're your own from five minutes ago, still searching. You've been here before, or maybe you'll be here later. Time does that sometimes, especially in stories about last things.

Between the shelves, you discover a reading room where people sit with half-empty coffee cups that never grow cold. Their conversations hang in the air like unfinished sentences, and you recognize the feeling—that moment when words fade before reaching their destination. You've felt it before, haven't you, reader? That sensation of almost-but-not-quite understanding something essential?

A woman sits at a desk made of mirror fragments. She's writing in a book that writes itself back, each word disappearing as soon as it's penned. You know her, though you've never met. (That's the thing about being in a story—everything is both real and not real, like quantum particles or promises made at midnight.)

"I've been waiting," she says, but her voice sounds like rustling pages.

You want to tell her you've been waiting too, but instead, you notice how the light through the windows falls in patterns that spell out words you almost remember. They remind you of something—perhaps that dream where you could read in colors, or that summer when the sunset looked like scattered punctuation marks.

In your pocket, you find a ticket stub from a movie you haven't watched yet. The title keeps changing every time you look at it, but the date remains the same: Today. Always today. (You see what I did there? Time is funny in stories, especially ones about endings that are really beginnings.)

The woman stands, and suddenly the room rearranges itself like a sentence being edited. Bookshelves become doorways, doorways become windows, windows become questions you never thought to ask. She hands you a book—your book, though you didn't know you'd written one.

"The ending's missing," you say.

"They always are," she replies, smiling with one corner of her mouth, the way people do when they know something you're about to figure out.

You open the book. Inside, there's a map of everywhere you've ever almost been, marked with X's that look suspiciously like kisses. Or perhaps they're asterisks, footnoting moments you'll understand later. (You're getting good at this, dear reader, finding meaning in the spaces between words.)

The woman is closer now, close enough that you can see her eyes are filled with library cards, each one cataloging a different way to say goodbye. You realize, with the peculiar clarity that comes with being a character in someone else's story (or is it your own?), that this is it—the last time you'll fall in love.

Not because it's ending, but because after this, all other loves will be echoes of this one. They'll be like books you've already read, stories whose endings you can guess three chapters in. This is the last first time your heart will fumble with the grammar of attraction, the last time love will feel like a foreign language you're desperate to learn.

The woman reaches for your hand, and her fingers are warm like well-worn book spines. Around you, the library hums with the sound of a thousand stories reaching their almost-endings. (Do you feel it too, reader? The way the words are pulling us toward something inevitable?)

"We should probably kiss now," she says, "before the metaphors run out."

And you do, in that space between one paragraph and the next, where all the best things happen. The kiss tastes like the last page of your favorite book—the one you've never been able to find again. It tastes like understanding finally catching up to experience.

When you open your eyes, the library has become a garden where flowers bloom in serif and sans-serif. The woman is still there, but now she's writing your name in cursive on the air, and you realize that maybe you're writing hers too, has been all along, in the margins of every story you've ever lived.

(And here, dear reader, is where I leave you—not because the story's over, but because the best endings are the ones we write ourselves, in the spaces between what's said and what's understood, in that moment when we realize we've been reading our own hearts all along.)

You close the book, but keep your finger between the pages, marking your place. After all, the best stories are the ones we never quite finish reading, the ones that keep writing themselves in our dreams, in our memories, in the way we learn to love after we think we've loved for the last time.

(Turn the page, if you like. Or don't. The story will wait for you either way.)