The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

You are bone to their cartilage, gravity to their flight.

“I like the sadness.”

And I loved talking to him. I felt drunk when I talked to him.

Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.”

“I worry that God might be lonely.”

True was an old word whose meaning we three had cobbled together to indicate things that felt indivisible.

I saw with Jack’s eyes, and he saw with mine.

“I’m filled with you, Heather.”

You said life happens here and now, and it’s a fool’s bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.

Jack is still missing, and your heart, your treacherous heart, refuses to let him go.

“It’s just that if Jack wasn’t true, then I don’t know what else to believe in. I really don’t. Everything feels false.”

Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love.