It All Started With A Glance

That’s how it happens. It always leads back to a single point. One look, one kiss, one touch of a hand, and suddenly you don’t belong to yourself anymore.

In the space of an instant, you are erased and reborn, rearranged into a new incarnation of you—a you that looks and behaves like the old one, but stands a little taller, and sees the world in sharper colours. Before you even have the chance to come to your senses, you have already shed the shell of your long solitude and stepped into the arms of another life. There was never any turning back.

I loved you in a glance across the living room in your apartment. It could only have lasted a handful of moments, but as I searched your watchful gaze, something with the shape of recognition surged between us, and by the time it was over, we both agreed, we would know each other very well.

I think of you still and those sweet, numbered days. Some nights, I thumb through them like pages of a worn, well-loved book, pausing now and again to read over my most cherished passages. The ageless hours learning each other, laughter saturating every room. The unmade beds and rumpled sheets. The patterns of our entangled bodies burnt into them permanently like a bloom of light on a photograph.

I think back on all the tears and every triumph, every sweet time and every hardship, until at last, I find myself right back at the very beginning, standing face to face to you in the living room of your old apartment, suspended in a breath, lost in the glance that started it all—our foreword, our leaping point, the seed of the rose garden.

The culmination of a series of chain reactions and chance accidents that smouldered our love into existence like a bright, burning sun.