They sit. Both of them. Together.
They sit on the couch, caught in the television glow, as the score quickens its pace and swells. There’s that sense that they should have always existed within the same boundaries of space and along the same timeline making its winding trajectory through myriad possibilities. They haven’t. They sit here now. [This moment]. The moment fills with the odd sensation, or rather it is his heart, which is what makes it seem as if it is the moment, that he’s always known her, that on some level they have always been connected the way they are in this present. Even as his eyes remain fixed on her, studying each gesture, anticipating a reaction, her reception of the narrative, as the score loops, rises, and falls, as the denouement reaches for loose ends, as the screen fills with a final embrace. His heart is flooded with counter currents. That duality of knowing that the moment should exist within brackets and being keenly aware that their presence acknowledges the finite nature of time. There too, the undertow, the slight quivering, the knowledge that fractures move things further from our grasp.
The television screen goes dark and time stretches infinitely in this space. He wraps his arms around her. She leans back. It’s as if all possibilities exist in this darkness, perhaps even that of her slipping away into the expanse, the way so much memory and its moments have. The way the decades behind them unraveled so quickly leaving only scant memories and never providing for the experiences that would have brought them to this moment sooner. And he holds her there in the dark wondering how if this was ever meant to be, their trajectory here was littered with so many wrong turns and lifetimes before what they hope, in this space, will be the lifetime they experience together.
It’s as if she knows his thoughts. She turns to him, bringing her face close to his until their foreheads and noses gently touch, and then turns just enough to bring her lips to his. His eyes close and he breathes her in, deeply. There is a perfection there, or a perceived perfection, or the perception of what perfection would be if it existed. There is a flooding in the chambers of his heart and within the synapses that map out the structures of the brain.