Two Lovers, Perhaps

There may have been a falling sky, a field of open blistered grasses expanded by the roiling storm: ashes, spores, drifting parts that fill my lungs, but I have remained blind to it; this world is ending, and I look at him.

We have been standing on the edge of one world for some time, on the brink of another. The doorway between these two worlds is a grisly and fantastical opening, and on the other side yawns a vast, jet darkness. Tempestuous winds carry debris through the open wounds of the earth, bringing oily, misshapen roots from the other side that curl around the lips of the gaping tear. They bring with them a disgruntling heat that I can feel on the swaths of exposed skin. It feels a bit like standing near a campfire, I think, removed. But the rest I cannot see, or at least I do not process. Mine is a rabbit’s heart, pattering against the plate of bones it lies behind, a bunched heat swelling as this other side continues to swallow our earth.

A faint glow burns there. I know this because I can see it as it kindles, a stormy, red light upon his face. The veins have spread further, his fingers dipped black, crawling up his throat, so I keep my eyes upon his, searching them as their waterline fills, because they are untouched by the darkness; they are windows to his beautiful soul.

I say his name, nearly lost on the wind, but somehow it makes its way to his ear. He turns, bottom lip pursed.

“We know what happens next?”

“I think so,” I respond, the glowering heat beginning to creep forth. “We’re going to die.”

I hear as he pushes a breath out, a suffocated, apprehensive blubber that ends with a whining, upset sound. “I don’t want to.” His tone is weak, wobbly, but his features hold fast as the ground rumbles.

“Well,” I say, choked, too, “If it means anything at all, I’m here with you.”

He grunts again, lips twisting into a frustrated pout that I cannot help but adore, even while the grasses are eaten alive, even as his frustration rises. “You’re not supposed to be. I told you.”

“I know.”

“I told you that if I was gonna die, and this whole—” He curses, “-You’re not supposed to be here! We both know you don’t need to be here. Just me.”

“I want to be,” I rebut, trying to be calm, eyes flicking between his face and the rupturing earth, in a search for comfort or in an attempt to provide it; I think it is both. The large, laboratory-esque tower stands behind us, the one from which we came, and even if we ran that way again, the hungry mouth of the monster ahead would catch up to us just as it would everything else. He would be far too stubborn to turn away anyway. His death ensures the continued life of all else, chosen for bullshit, a hero in his inevitable death. Not for the first time, I can only think of how terrible he is to think this world is so valuable.

“I want to be here with you. That’s important to me.”

“Living isn’t?” He cries, and in place of a response, I reach over to grip his hand. Shocked at first, he stays quiet, looking at where we interlock. I would be satisfied with this; before the end had started, I had said everything I needed to, as did he, save for one thing.

This moment of bliss could only last so long, and I knew this as I told him: “I love you.”

He is rendered silent, just looking, watery-eyed, into the inside of me. I can feel it: that he had the ability to look into my soul, a feeling that had been with me from the moment we met so long ago, before he responds. “There were a lot of things I wanted to do.” The words are garbled and wet. I merely nod. “We won’t, though, and I wanted to.”

“I know.”

He looks forward again, this time resigned. We knew what would come next: we would die. But I turn my feet towards him fully, our bodies somehow warmer than the heart of fire ahead. Reaching up, I grasp his nape, cupping it to my palm and dragging down, lips parted in invitation to seal us both to our bound fates.

We may not be able to look towards what won’t come next. We will never learn the drive home by heart, or the name of his childhood street. We will not fall deeper into each other, if that is even possible. We will not marry. We will not grow difficult or gentle with age. We will never stand in a doorway at the end of a long and ordinary day. We will not live more than a few moments. But for a strange, calming moment, we can pretend this is good; that we have loved each other the full length of a life, and that we are old and tired and ready for the stop, even as it is furthest from the truth.

Although we might die tonight, today, whatever the time is in these two dimensions between, the world will end and begin with us. And that’s what life is, is it not? Giving your love until you can no longer? That’s good, then. He has all of mine.

_________

In the centuries that come later, the valley is beautiful again. Wildflowers rise through the eroded stone, clutching through toppled walls of brick and soil. Moss drapes the broken arches like soft cloth, and sunlight pools in the hollows of what was once a large series of buildings, only now outlines in the sunken earth. The skies are white with no clouds, flocks of feathered animals sweeping the expanse of it. A wanderer moves carefully among broken ruins, documenting what remains of what has been returned to the earth, as most things tend to do, with time. In the heart of the valley lies a tear’s old scar, now a mirror of water reflecting soft light. And half-sunken in the silt, rest two skeletons curled together, fetally. One bears thin, black markings that lace the bones, inked like tattoos into the cortical bone; the other, smaller, holds the marked form close, their arms still encircling what a body was. The structure of their once-faces lies close together, as if they had touched, but in their rot, they grew apart only an inch. The wanderer lingers, uncertain whether to call it tragedy, crouched low in the soil beside them, and writes beside the catalog of findings this:

Two lovers, perhaps.