Temporality

Time on the page, time at the tip of my pen, does not flow as days and hours do. Time pools, time crystallizes, time stands still. And so that night when two strangers became strangers no longer, sitting without facing one another in the powdered-graphite night, a night so smudged with retracing, reshaping, remembering, that all its edges are now blurred—now that spectral night returns to me, and I hold time still. In these words, glances dart and dance once more, trying to decipher, trying to hide, in that game of endless stakes that we call “attraction.” I hear velvet voices murmuring words that by themselves mean nothing, but coupled with the night, with the stirrings of youth, and with fingers edging closer, retreating back, edging closer once more, mean “Tu me plais. Et moi, est-ce que je te plais aussi ?“

The answer then was, “Oui.”

And even now, tu me plais encore, si seulement tu le savais…

But time also slips away. In writing I spare broken hearts the pain of breaking again. In words, lovers can become strangers once more. Writing is not a forgetting spell, but it does condense, it does abbreviate, and sometimes it erases too. So a first kiss in writing can take three hours to read, while forever can take no more than three seconds.

One. They met. They loved.

Two. Or at least, they tried.

Three. Then they never saw each other again.