When He Slips Back In

Every once in a while, she is wonderfully sure that a portal opens between the life she finds herself trapped in, and his, the next. She hears a song on the radio play more frequently than other days, and she smells his cologne in the strangest of places, at the oddest of times, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and unknown voices. She abruptly awakens in the middle of the night, sure that she felt his hand clutch hers, as he delicately whispers her name.

She knows it’s him. She knows his voice and she recalls his familiar, pacifying touch. Her heart at once recognizes how his hand used to feel in hers, and she dawdles in the sensation she has so dreadfully missed. She searches for him in a crowd when she feels him brush past her, and she closes her eyes to linger in the breath-taking familiarity of what was once him. She unintentionally checks her watch at exactly the same time each day, and when she recognizes the pattern, she knows that he is close. She knows that he is reaching out to her. She knows that he has slipped back in, even if only for a while. She knows his heart needs hers almost as much as her heart needs his. She knows that somehow; he’s tricked the stars and conspired against the universe for just one more moment with her.

She is flung into an unresponsive haze as she clings to him once more, and she lives it all, one more time. It had to have been a fault in the universe’s plan. Her heart wasn’t the same anymore. Her soul speaks differently, and she no longer fits in or belongs. She wanders through this universe with a world full of people who are all a little strange to her. She is different. She is an outsider to this world. There had to have been a fault.

She pines for him and now she is reasonably certain that he misses her too. Her sorrow is still only love. Unspent love that has nowhere to go anymore, so when her world creates a portal for him to come back through to her, her love finally escapes from the corner of her eyes. She begins to whisper when she really wants to shout. She wholeheartedly welcomes and embraces the opening when she should surely walk away from it.

She becomes quiet as she stops her shuddering voice from speaking and she just feels. For a while, she can’t move forward, and she lingers in the opening of the portal with him, just one more time. Those are the days that matter. Those are the days that keep her heart from dying. They are the days that allow her to breathe for just a little while longer. She no longer needs people. All she wants is him and the beauty of his love for her. She hunts his strength because she no longer feels much of anything else, other than intense hankering and excruciating anguish.

When the portal closes again, she passes her days waiting for the gateway to him to open once more, so that they can dance and splash around in the puddles of one another’s hearts again. Without the portal, the world she is stuck in, is simply a life she needs to get away from. She can’t hear much of anything, and there is barely space for her to breathe as she drowns in the silence.

She rambles around purposelessly through this life, waiting and begging for a miracle to release all the caged love in her heart, so that she can see the beauty in her world, and not crave the healing in the next. She wants her second chance in her world. She wants someone in her world, to touch her again. She wants to forget, but only, until that portal opens again.

She will never say goodbye to him. She will never let him go. But, if you stumble across her, just hold her close and love her when the portal to him, closes again.