Prologue
Les temps est parfois un allié, parfois un ennemi
October, 2010
Dear diary,
Love. I have long since given up the idea one can choose who they love. Loving is never choosing. Our love, is more a force than a love created outside of us.
Created to bind us, to rewrite us, to undo us and in the end to destroy or to fix us. Love like an inescapable and unbreakable spell written into our bones long before we were even born.
This love is our gravity, our destiny, our course and our curse, our everything and our nothing. Our love is our undoing, our downfall.
He is mine and I am his. We did not fall in love, slowly, expected, the way two people meet and are supposed to fall in love.
No, we collided. We collided with full force into the inevitable collapse of our own orbits. Two planets on the same course, chasing each other in circles, seeing each other, reaching out, but somehow out of reach.
Every moment together a moment burned too brightly, consumed too consumptive. Every moment of our every being.
Our every moment was in the little things. It was in the way our eyes locked across my father’s crowded restaurant as he sat in the shade of the awnings, working on his papers, just to be near me, just to be with me.
It was in the stolen glances we exchanged as we walked along the Seine, imperceptible brushes of fingers, unnoticed by anyone but us. But to us it was everything.
The beginning of a journey neither of us had seen coming. It was in the way his long, outstretched limbs lingered under a table next to mine.
It was in all the subtle touches. It was in the way we had to catch our breath from kissing in the stolen moments between work and study. It was in the way I read to him. It was in the way I spoke to him through my music.
It was in every moment we shared before life tore us apart, before I tore us apart. Every reunion would just meant another goodbye. We are young. Reckless in our devotion. Mad in our longing. Head over heels in our love.
And yet in our destiny, written in all its cruelty, it is decreed that we could never be. Because of me.
Maybe in another life. Maybe in a thousand others. But not in this one. Not in ours. In this life, we are each other’s downfall. It is the longing in the times when we are apart.
The ghostly memory that lingers in the space between dreaming and waking. In this life we are two souls so close and yet we can‘t be further apart and we know, we know, deep in our hearts we know that we are never meant to be.
Never meant to be us. Nothing more than gravity. An idea of us. Nothing more than a love living in the shadows of the truth. Nothing more than a life half lived.
~ Matty
