Forget Me Not

by Karissa Kinword

There’s something to be said about slow motion. It’s like—life improvising. Like, the universe is asking for a moment to figure itself the fuck out.

“What if everything in the universe is already decided, you know? What if it doesn’t matter what I do anyway, because I’m just along for the ride?”

‘She and I love in ways that can’t be explained, bottled, written, or imitated. Our love is for the stars.’”

Patching a tear in anything will only work so many times before the blemish grows too large, too scathing. The adhesive just gets weaker and weaker the more you replace it, the problem grows too large to surmount. Eventually, you have to decide to either rid it, or restore it—or find a new thing all together.

Silas doesn’t love me like all the characters love their counterparts in these books—because it’s more than that. He loves me through them, in pieces, like patchwork on a quilt, a stitch here, a pattern there, never completely sewn together. Like he hasn’t yet read his favorite story, but he’s constantly trying.

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

🥲🤍

It’s possible, I think, that Silas and I had filtered through all determined pre-destiny. That the universe recognized I was ready for him, and he had more than deserved it.

If I’m a book, then he is all the lines between every sentence. He’s the curve of each letter reaching out to kiss the next, the swooping song of every italic, the pausing breath of well placed punctuation. I am the words, but he is the way in which you read them.

“Without you I would know nothing of love, Eliza. You are the definition of it,” he says, holding my wrists where they rest underneath his chin. “I am content to be in love with you until the last star falls from the sky.”