Eventually, for those who return to gravity’s hold, the echoes stop stirring, the vertigo allays, the disorientation becomes unfamiliar, and the world and space they once left returns to its familiar comfort. What is left is the memory of existing, for a finite moment, in a completely different reality. It is the kind of memory that sometimes weaves itself into dreams, sometimes forces wandering thoughts to recall the splendor of the experience, and is sometimes the revelry that ends a day.
The walls begin to collapse outward, the barren lights which create the shadows, the fans which conjure the breezes, the dotted tapestries which pretend stars, all of them exposed. And still, they lie there, aware of the fact that the in between is not sufficient to sustain a life, let alone their story. In this overexposed tableau of night, they disentangle themselves from each other. The healing of arms must rupture and they pull away from the hearth they have created in the center between them. The fans’ continuing stream quickly whips at the remaining warmth between them. They face each other as they dress, and they face it, the reality. They know that worlds must come together to fill the space where there was an in between, or what they found there would vanish.
Like Apollo, they each hurled the mass of their existence, of their experience, and all the satellites in orbit at the space, hoping to invoke a confluence. It was, perhaps, an act of magical thinking, the believing that what felt like it was meant to be made it so. The satellites orbits were the first to lose their trajectory and they began colliding with each other. The stars around the attempted confluence became harder to see with each collision. And though it felt like they had known each other before dreams, they had to conclude there is no life without stars. Like Sisyphus the boulders slipped from their grip, the worlds hurled away from each other, and what had been in a moment and a space between became nothing more than one of those dreams you remember having and remember enjoying but which never fully materialized since you woke a bit too soon.