The Fall

by Tal Bauer

It scares me how deep this love runs when I have no memory of how we got here. Every atom of me is oriented toward him. He is my North Star.

I’m so close to being whole again. My body remembers what it needs to do, and my heart knows how much it wants to love. But how is it possible to feel so utterly complete when my past is a fracture of half-remembered moments? It’s terrifying how life can change in a heartbeat and erase everything you know and love about yourself.

There is a deep and final shift in my soul when it recognizes its other half and knows it is finally home.

This is a wound in the center of me that spills out a grief I don’t have the right to feel.

How do I save us from an ending I can only glimpse in shattered glass and broken screams?

It’s safer to believe in brain injury than in loops or in fate. Safer to believe Zolotarev broke me. No concussion protocol allows for worrying about time loops; the medical forms don’t let you fill in “afraid I am repeating my own life.”

I have been here before. This is not déjà vu. This is a film reel clicking through the same sprockets, frame by agonizing frame, and I am inside a moment I have already lived. I have been here, lived this, experienced this, before.

I understand now; I’m back at the beginning that was really the middle, heading toward an ending I’ve already endured.

I loved him once without knowing why. I love him now knowing everything. I’ll love him always, even when time steals him away again.

That’s my final, fixed fact. I’m grateful, I am. I wanted forever, but I only ever had a year, a minute, a heartbeat. Still, I’d give it all up for him. He is my ocean, and he is finally free of the storm.