In the City of Light

In That Haze — No16 (Micro)

Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash

You hold my hand as if it’s a fragile thing you want to keep forever.

I don’t ask you about endings. I don’t have it in me. Tomorrow, you’ll leave on a plane — to go somewhere far away from me — but today we are here in the City of Light, amazing as the sun sets along the Seine.

You press a kiss to my cheek as we linger on the streets. I laugh and wonder, just wonder, what I did to earn such bliss.

But maybe I didn’t earn anything at all.

We are masters of our own fates, after all. I try to tell myself that even as I know — I know, I know, I know — all about the end of the story.

Lovers break apart. Or they die, one before the other, through tricks of existence. Someday — someday far off, I hope — you will walk on these streets alone. Without me, without me, without me.

Tonight I will go home and write in my journal all about the way you make me feel. I will embellish in poetry, I will make love to you in stanzas, and I will embrace you in the white space between words.

But at the end of the day — at the end of it all — we all know that love cannot last.

Even the greatest love stories had endings. All stories, no matter how epic, have their ends. We anticipate…