North and South

When I press against him like a magnet, as if there's some molecular ground I've still not covered, he presses back like he's not convinced, either.

I want so badly to be closer, for a way to get closer than I am, because are we nothing but searching for a connection like this? People die in the middle of that search, as it appears to have no beginning or end, save for birth and death. But I've come to a standstill, because I think I've come as close as I'm going to get. There's this situation in front of me, holding me so tight that it's cracking the glass I'm made of, and all I want is closer, closer, closer; I do not care if it shatters because our pieces will be on the floor, pulverized to sand, indistinguishable from each other. If that were possible, neither of us would survive.

But this is it - this is the closest I will ever get to another human being. This is realizing that no matter how much I may need or want to, I will never be indistinguishable from another soul.

It is all happenstance; all accidental, circumstantial. We were not "two people in the right place at the right time," and this was not, in any way, "meant to be." We were just two kids, in a place, at a time. I simultaneously hate and love how that almost makes it more incredible that this story continues to exist, at both the beginning and the end at all times, and it is sweet, tragic, fucked up, beautiful, frozen, romantic, ignited, eternal, and finite, all at once.

It does not care who I am with or what other obligations I may have. It destroys everything when it resurrects itself to write another chapter, violently and unpredictably, with no regard for something as trite as time or other people. It happens in seconds and decades, hours and lifetimes, and when he's there, all of those might as well be the same thing. It does not stay even long enough to take it for granted, but it never completely dies - I have killed it with every weapon known to man, and cried over what I swore was its corpse many times over, and though it's had many funerals, I can't recall one burial.

It does not know separation or divorce, marriage or commitment, because those things are choices, and the concept of a choice in this matter seems laughable at best - I simultaneously envy and pity those who have those sorts of choices. I wouldn't wish this on anyone in a million years, but if I could go back to the day we met - a day I don't even remember - I wouldn't do a damn thing differently.

We'll likely never end up like most people do; there is no happy ending for us, because we're dodging the monster at the end of the book - that whole mess that people get into where you look at someone one day and realize they're part of the furniture - and this cannot end like that, even though he'll leave or I'll leave and it'll hurt, again and again. It is not peaceful or satisfying, but my God it is everything else, and as far as I know, I do not have a way out of it.

This is the closest we can get, but I'll keep pressing...after all, what choice does one have, in matters of magnets and monsters and two people who fit together better than most atoms do?