Work Text:
We've been waiting for years for them to finish building
the bridge between our towns. Across the long wide lake it stretches, the pylons and stays running up and down like mountain silhouettes.
Each holiday evening when crews are absent and security resting comfortably at home, we each mount the bridge, cross the security fences, and walk the distance to the farthest completed edge. One mile, then two, then three.
I am still five miles from you, but as we sit apart together, kicking our feet over the water, it is the closest we have been and will be for as long as it takes.
We've been waiting for years for them to finish building the stargate between our colonies. Above the curving surface of the moons it arcs, the massive incomplete circle dwarfing the smaller circumferences of the planets we orbit as they hang in the sky.
Each rest day evening when the workers have left their grav suits on the wall to collapse into bunks, we duck the barrier and walk, deliberately, to the center of the structure. Sections loom above us, two, then four, then six.
There are light years between us physically, but chronologically only a few hundred segments of magnetic arcs. We sit simultaneously, distorted from each other by spacetime, and stare into the stars that will one day, soon, no longer divide us.
We've been waiting years for them to fix the broken neurons between me and you seeing me again. Your eyes remain shut and your mind remains trapped within itself, wandering somnambulously between life and death.
I know you do not hear me when I speak to you, but we knew this was coming and we planned for it. Every evening I am by your bed, and wherever you are, you imagine yourself at mine. Within your mind I am within my own mind, where you are within yours and you are nested into me deeper than my self.
Together alone in our own limbos we await the advance of medicine or of my age. One of the two will reunite us. My hand is in yours and it is the closest we will be until then.
Every time I die I understand; the picture is shown to me. We are anti-magnet soulmates, destined to be apart in whatever lifetime we coincide in. Our destiny to bear alone what might have been made bearable only by the presence of the other. It is the yearning the human has always felt for that farther shore, that distant planet, that elusive dream state, the impulse that drives us to build and connect and repair across distance. But localized into a single, breathing cynosure.
I am a stalactite. You are a stalagmite. The only inevitably in the world is our collision, and the only impossibility in the world is Now.