Until We Meet Again

I was sixteen, and you were seventeen. It could only, ever, have ended in tragedy.

I will never forget the day we met, though it is many lifetimes ago. We were so young—that is how I will always think of us, as being young. The first time we spoke, I was struck with the inimitable certainty of some force, some great preternatural movement, having brought us together. We were pulled towards each other like planets to their stars. Like tides to their moon. It was like the crawl of continents, suddenly meeting in an inevitable slide, crashing into one another, the earth in our wake rifting, chasm-ing, erupting.

We held each other close as the fire belched out its final wintering, the ash that settled on our clothes and hair, that blinked on your eyelashes. We held each other close as the world ended.

We were so young. To be so young, but to feel so ancient, to feel a part of something ageless. We were poor and dirty and stupid but together we became part the poetic filth of nature, a thing pure and fundamental. We met behind the stables in the falling light, stealing kisses; the dusky smell of horses, the shapeless movement of rats in the shadows, roughness of hard-worked hands. We planned to run away and marry, somewhere far from the stink of our servitude, where the land was fertile and water was clean. We could not outrun the sickness. It took our families first, and you were too wretched with grief and fear to come away with me then, before they shut the gates and sealed us in. We were foolish enough to think our love might save us. We imagined repopulating the world with our children. We told each other this in whispers, even as the blackness took our bodies, even as the spittle turned to blood in our mouths, and painted our lovers’ lips cherry, even as the world around us died and died again in ditches and byways.

We were so foolish. We believed ourselves untouchable. The stars had ordained it, and how could we, mortals that we were, defy them? Foolhardy to the end, in the face of your father, the paving-stones of enmity on which our houses were built—we were more ancient and eternal than any stone, any grudge, any star. And perhaps they were envious of our unabashed light, for they snuffed us as quick as a match.  I remember how you looked, laid out on your catafalque, enshrined in candles like a saint. A hapless pilgrim, come too late—how cruel that we should not die together! So young, too young. It was young lovers’ right to die together, and so I took matters into my own hands, and kissed your still-warm lips. Eyes, look your last! We would be immortalized in poetry, and live forever, young, bright, and doomed.

I was married when I met you. Your husband had met his death some months ago, and mine waited for his at the tavern. We were very often alone, until we found each other. Oh, how wicked we must be, that the Lord should punish us with this love, in these forms! Our time of wickedness was the most blessed I had ever known, and I was prepared—almost eager—to burn with you in the fires of Hell for this, the most worthy of sins. In the end, we did burn. But for wickednesses which insulted our true devilry; you, too joyful a widow, and I, too barren a wife. They pricked the mark upon your breast, which I had kissed only that morning—had kissed time and again, unremembered—your Witch’s mark, a sign of good luck, bad luck, destiny, or the fatal wound of a past life—

Had we only been gifted with the Devil’s oracle, we would have sung on our pyres, for we would meet again, on earth as it is in heaven.

The stars go on forever, but men live and die and live and die again, crawling out of the water and into the forest and over the mountains and into the ground, their eyes on the heavens. If only man had kept his eyes upon the ground! If only man had continued to eat and sleep and rut like the beasts, not to hunger and dream and love! Once, I was a sculptor and you my muse. Once, a handmaiden to your Majesty. I would have been content to be a rabbit, and you a fox. I would have been content to be a flower to your bee. But again and again, we are born to screaming mothers, and we crawl into our lives. We grow, impossibly—despite famine, war, and flood we grow until we are stretched on the rack of adolescence. Perhaps it is why the young are immortal. There is a time to die, and ours was always the same.

There was a time that we survived. Having had perhaps some enduring premonition of our impending elanguescence, we fled to the country at the first whiff of bomb, and remained whole and blissful in our cozy fox-hole, until they smoked you out and put you on a ship with a gun between your knees. I was twenty-two, and you were twenty-three. They sent me a medal and a cheque. I wish they had sent me your gun, for the way I went was much slower.

I must have been born with a heart full of dazzling hope, after that, or a dazzling rage. When the next letter came, we burned it. We got on a bus that would take us over the border in a cloud of smoke, away from the police and the government and all the higher powers that were trying their damnedest to wrench us from each other. When we tasted the universe, it spoke to us of a love that had started in the dark, fertile belly of the cosmos, stretched across time and space and matter and void, and like matter was cyclical and endless and fluid, and everyone was it and it was everyone, all together. This was the closest we ever got to understanding. We might have laughed about it in years to come, if there had been any. It may have been some comfort to you, wherever you lay in the dizzy undergrowth of the underbelly of whatever city you had hitched to, whatever you had breathed in, breathed out, or melted onto your tongue, that the bullets sounded just like the jungle rain, and that I thought of you until the end.

We may have become embittered to the world of men, but all bitterness is alchemized in your capable hands. It is impossible to forget the days in the sun, unbearably sweet in their brevity. Once, we lived so long together that your temples sprouted gray hairs. I kissed them every morning. We fought, that time—perhaps because the world had given us our expiration date in plain writing, along with a prescription, a support group, and a political movement. On borrowed time, we clung to each other. We made plans for the future—the near future. We got a cat. I was grateful for every minute, drank them like clear water, swallowed them like hopeful pills. The world let us die together, in the shadow of a new millennium.

I was sixteen, and you were seventeen. It could only, ever, have ended this way.

I never forget the day we met, though it seems many lifetimes ago. We were so young—that is how I still think of us, though the mirror tells a different story. The first time we spoke, I asked if I knew you from somewhere. Sometimes I still ask that, though now it is because I’ve forgotten. I forget many things, these days. That’s what happens when you’re as old as me—you’ve lived too many years to keep them all in your head anymore, at once. When I do remember, I remember love. I remember our first kiss, our wedding vows. Our babies being born. I remember every time I thought I would lose you, and every time you stayed. Sometimes I call you by a different name, but you come to me all the same.

When I’ve forgotten everything else, I know that you’ll come to me. In all of time and space and memory, you’ve always come to me, and you always will. Of this I’m sure. I have no fear of the end, because I know you’ll be there with me, and we’ll hold each other close, until we meet again.