Star-Crossed

The glassy blue-green of the tide pounded against a shore of dark gold, almost mechanically. Glints of white-gold off an undulating azure plain marred memories and coherent thought; strands of straw dipped into the glimmering crescent broken by shadowy ripples. A pair of silver feet swished back and forth in tandem with the heartbeat tick-tocking somewhere within hearing range.

He had spent a week alone with her here at the edge of the earth, and he couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t his entire world. The sun was the golden glint on her hair, wet from the ocean; the moon was their fingers, pale under the night sky, touching, entwined, exploring; the merry chirps of the birds was her brilliant smile as she turned to say something to him when they ventured further into the thick of the woods. “There’s no turning back now,” she’d said.

     There’s no turning back now.

     With each ebb and flow, grey-white foam jumped against the craggy rock, never quite managing to make it over. Flecks of foam stuck to the faded wood of the little cabinet standing atop the flat surface of the rock, fizzling out within seconds. The small stack of books sitting at the foot of the cabinet didn’t seem affected at all by the dampness or the howling wind, although the jewel tones of their covers did seem just a little washed out.

     An unearthly wail, so distant it was but a mere whimper riding the wind, sounded from somewhere. The wind grew stronger with a whip-like touch, and the wail grew with it — louder, and closer, until it became evident that it wasn’t a cry but a song zipping along his nerve endings, angry and eerie and beautiful.

     The wind didn’t stop. As it filled the air with its relentless howling, the red book at the top of the stack underneath the cabinet fell to the ground, where its pages were whipped open, caught in a mad dance with the wind. 

     It was like one of those books in which each page presented a frame of action, and which you flipped through rapidly to see a moving image. The story was there, and he knew he needed to see it, but it hung just out of reach, the colours flashing and lives hurtling through existence and time and he couldn’t interpret them, not from here. He tried to edge closer, to lean over and look straight into the eye of the book. He was almost there, catching a glimpse of something…but what? Almost…

  He blinked awake. Silver danced before his eyes; he blinked it away. But he wasn’t rid of all the clinging vestiges of the dream. The steady beat of a heart still lingered, so faint it could just have been a figment of his imagination.

     As his body descended from its adrenaline high and warm sweat turned into clamminess, he realized that the beat came from the clock mounted across the room, its tick resounding in the night’s stillness.

     Another sound, one that brought so much more reassurance and familiarity than that old clock, pierced the buzz of his veins: a low, musical rise and fall of breath. He turned toward the mane of strawberry blond spilling across the pillow — there was a brief shock of red hair and azure blue — 

     The aromatic trickling of dark liquid into the clear plastic of the coffeemaker was familiar to the point of obscurity, integral to the rhythm of the morning. He grabbed the square of 100% whole wheat toast that had just popped out of the toaster and buttered it sloppily as he bustled about the kitchen, black blazer hung over the crook of his elbow. He stuffed the corner of the toast into his mouth and glanced at the time on the microwave — ‪8:52. Cursing, he downed a few gulps of coffee, shrugged the blazer on, and dashed out the front door. 

     The suburban neighbourhood was warm and still, the asphalt of the driveways smooth and the trees’ branches swaying lazily in a light breeze. He slid into the driver’s seat of his car, sparing another curse as the coffee in his travel mug sloshed over the top when he dropped it clumsily into the cupholder. He pulled into the driveway, and was off. 

     He laid in bed, facing the blank white of his ceiling. Another day had slipped right out of his grasp, before he had time to even realize it. The present suddenly seemed so still, so motionless after a day he couldn’t even remember. He tried to move, to sit up, but it was as if his body, along with his physical surroundings, was locked firmly in place and only his consciousness roamed free of constraint. He wasn’t trapped; he was, at last, real.

     The ceiling above him warped . Spilling through in a myriad of shapes and colours was time and life and that familiar fiery mane, bubbling laughter, falling through his ceiling, no, falling through time itself, for this house, and this life, were mere pinpricks in their communal existence.  

     A roadside motel, sunny with faded wallpaper; a promenade in the gardens of sixteenth century England; the loud and colourful streets of a futuristic city by night, so brightly lit it might as well have been daytime; the eerily quiet landscape of an old civilization, razed; a girl falling through time and through lives, and it wasn’t just a girl, it was him, too — running with bare feet through golden dust with the salty wind between their fingers at the edge of the earth. 

     Perhaps the most frightening part of it all was the sudden realization that he was so much larger than he was accustomed to being, and how the skin he was meant to fill was so big it felt as if he was drowning. 

     He realized he had stopped falling when the rush of the tide and cold breeze alerted him to the stillness of his body. There was that red book, open and beckoning. He stepped closer and there the whirl of red hair was, between the pages, and a pale hand that reached out to him. 

     She turned to face him, eyes like newborn stars and a voice like a galaxy’s edge. He was enraptured, the light of her gaze reflected in his irises, and as the pages turned the story became utterly real to him. Somehow he knew exactly what he was to do as he stepped forward and took her hand. 

     His hand was in hers, and they were running, drifting. The glassy blue-green of the tide pounded against a shore of dark gold, almost mechanically. Glints of white-gold off an undulating azure plain marred memories and coherent thought; strands of straw dipped into the glimmering crescent broken by shadowy ripples. A pair of silver feet swished back and forth in tandem with the heartbeat tick-tocking somewhere within hearing range.

He had spent a week alone with her here at the edge of the earth, and he couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t his entire world.