well, heaven must have sent you to save me from the rapture

Sitting atop a notably high lifesaver’s chair in the very centre of the city is a girl of nine years. Nobody could tell her why it was there and the paint was still wet, but she thought the candy red against the powdery blue sky too tempting, and she craved a better view.

Below: a boy and a girl. Rather, a lady, for she was 21 and while she felt herself no longer a ‘girl’, she thought ‘woman’ made her sound fat. And rather, a guy, for he was undoubtedly no longer a boy, but ‘man’ made her too aware of the fact that he was more than a decade older than her.

They met at the same place. Halfway through, after watching one another frown behind their lenses and cigarettes, they shook hands and each said the other’s name respectively. They had anticipated meeting one another, knowing all along their hearts belonged to someone they had yet to have met, respectively. Together they sat until sunrise, with cheap coffee, soft music, more cigarettes, waiting for the sun to come up because then the world would know what they had always known.

From there, it was like any other story. Every story of love and life and lyrics is invariably a mirror of every other: We are born, we live. As we age we get married, we get a home loan, we get wrinkles, we get promoted, we get divorced, we get cancer, we get progressively more listless until we are so sick of lying that we die. All of the holding hands, sunrise, sunset, kissing, sex, the perfect curve, mistakes, make-up, break-ups, wake-up calls at dusk, the crying infants and the new furniture. All of the happiness, the very quotidian continuity that happens by anticipation, happens. All of this while somewhere across the globe, just outside of where the girl can see, a child dies of starvation. Roses bloom and pennies drop, teenagers have unsafe sex in ignorance, students graduate, drug addicts fall in gutters, a Catholic boy holds his girlfriend’s hand while she has a backalley abortion where the streetlights have already gone out.

They waited for something to go wrong, as it would. All factors pointed them apart, not star-crossed but cock-eyed and so likely to fail. A desire, a prostitution of a free mind, a wish that they were generic beings genetically programmed to fit into one another like wires.

But the sun came up and the world knew but never really cared. The baby never cried again, another never would. Their fingers grew stiff from exposure and eventually they died too. It was the first beautiful death in history; a sunset, a pair, a song on repeat, and two hands that never let go, despite the lingering expectation of the inevitable, the wait for life to occur as it promised it would.