Before We Disappear

I'll steal your heart,' he said 'You cannot steal a gift freely given.

Kindness isn't something you should have to earn," I muttered. "You may be right, but I think we both know that that's not always the way the world works.

Because hatred is like a fire. It will spread within you, consuming everything indiscriminately. You’ve too much good here”—I tapped his chest—“to let that happen.

The universe rarely gives us what we want. Sometimes we must content ourselves with what we're given.

Running from you would be like running from the air in my lungs.

His rakish strut and disarming smile were the perfect counterpoint to the Enchantress. She was a dream made flesh and he was a bad idea impossible to resist. Together they were beguiling.

Jack, however, appeared to me as a victorious cry. He crackled like Tesla’s fire. He was a million mirror shards turned inward, he was a rootless tree following the sun. Jack was the most glorious creature I had ever seen, so flawed and yet so hopeful, even if he denied it.

I watched from the between as colors pulsed from Jack’s chest, traveled through his arms to his hands, and flowed into and then from the violin. Jack wasn’t simply playing music, he was creating it from his dreams and his heart, from his soul, and he was giving it to me. I caught the colors and wrapped them about myself like a cocoon, unsure what I would emerge as later, but I left room within so that when Jack’s song ended, he could join me inside.

I was kissing the sound of applause, the smell of a new fire on a frigid winter morning, the warmth of the summer sun. We became vines entwined about one another for a season, we were the sun and moon dancing in the same blue sky.

You were never the caterpillar. You have always been my butterfly, just as I am you phoenix, and together we will fly far from here.

I know that this might seem futile, but the dawn always follows the dark. And if you're right, and our ship is doomed to go down, then we'll sink together and I'll play us a lullaby on the ocean floor.

I think it must've been a person who'd wished for love but had never known it who'd created the first clock. Because time is a reminder of how quickly the present passes and how little of the future remains, and no one in love would want to know that.

I have been trapped in this dark tunnel for so long that I can't remember life outside of it. I met you and I thought you were the light at the end. I thought you had come to guide me out of hell, but now I fear that, if you stay, you'll only wind up trapped here with me.

We became vines entwined about one another for a season, we were the sun and moon dancing in the same blue sky.

We don't invite trouble to dinner,' she always said, 'because then it will expect to stay for dessert.

He was a million mirror shards turned inward, he was a rootless tree following the sun.

Jack was home to me now too, and I knew with absolute conviction that I could find him anywhere.

And then, in the silence between notes, in the emptiness between dreams, in the endless worlds between yesterday and tomorrow, we disappeared.