Forget Me Not

by Karissa Kinword

He leans in and kisses me again, the damp ends of his eyelashes bat against the tips of my own. Somewhere along the way his eyes have glazed and welled. I realize that I’ve never seen Silas cry. I’ve never even dreamt of it.

“That’s it, Eliza. I love you. I love how you come for me, I love how you feel when I bring you there. I love you…I love you.”

It’s euphoric when we cry out together, wailing a siren’s song that will beg to be heard in the empty hallows of our minds for the forsaken nights to come.

His soft hair. The way his eyes crinkle when he laughs. The silvery scar that curves along his temple. The smell of his skin. The sparse hair of his beard. Don’t forget these little details, don’t let them fade for lack of attention.

The Star Souls Theory Two souls are formed from the dust of one star. When the time comes and it ceases to exist, the brilliant, shining star gives itself to the universe—its tandem energy parting ways for a time before inevitably coming back together, destined to be born into the souls of living beings. Those of which are connected intrinsically to one another on this shared plane. Only the luckiest ones will find their other half.

I found you. The other half of my star.

This is the day I’ve been incandescently waiting for. The first real day of thousands still yet to be lived on the other side of the subconscious wall I’ve broken through with Silas. It’s as if every dream I’ve ever had was just a preview.

“I’ll thank the cosmos endlessly for granting us Elysium, even if just for the few spins we had together,” he whispers. “For showing me I wasn’t wasting my life in waiting for a fantasy.”

“One thing we failed to remember is that not every story has a happy ending, Birdie, or even a fair one. And sometimes the best ones leave you gutless and aggrieved, wishing you could tell the people between the pages what to do to make it right before everything goes wrong.”

“I would have told myself to kiss you earlier,” he says. “Read to you longer, never to fall asleep.”

“To forgo the formalities and tell you I loved you beneath the shade of that yellow flowered tree on the Continental. Because I knew it then, and long before that moment.”

“Will you ever forgive me?” he asks.

“Forgive you for what, Sy?” “For waiting for you.”

Even if I’d read the last chapter first, if I’d seen the ending before the start, I would have done it all again. Maybe each line would sting a little harder, every word would read a little sweeter, every miscommunication would hurt so much deeper. But so would all the love.

“Don’t ever apologize for giving me the fullest life I could find,”

I could be okay, I think. The goodbye didn’t need to be accompanied by a bold stamped ‘The End’ as a book would have it.

“I was terrified that if I closed my eyes for too long I would start to forget—with all that darkness where I used to dream. I would forget the little things. The way you smell, the way that light reflects your eyes, the way you feel when you hold me like this, when you kiss me, when you make love to me. I couldn’t let myself. I couldn’t just forget you.”

“Oh, Eliza,” he says against my lips, “you will forget me not.”

It was all a long, fantastic dream.

“I don’t need to read a different story anymore, Birdie, because ours is my favorite one.”

I feel like this little moment of my life has already happened—in a thought, maybe in a dream.

Silas? Silas.

Are you ever going to tell him about me?

I dream about Silas every night, but this was different. Like the teeth of every previously mismatched key in a lock finally sliding into place. A door opening to a different world of connection.

All I know, is that was the realest my life has ever felt on an unconscious plane. Much less like a dream, more like a premonition. “Silas.”

“Ah look, new travelers just pulled in,” Logan says. My breath catches in my throat as I watch the doors slide open.