There's so many things- flashbulb memories and textbook terms- and my mind is a never-ending grainy film of anachronisms. They keep playing in a furious whirlwind around my head when I sleep, invading my dreams but not really because they've been there all along.

I see snippets of my favorite stuffed animal when I'm six and we read Les Miserables together in the summer when I'm sixteen. It's a heavy book and it crushes the Taylor Polynomials, leaving them crumpled and dead on a battlefield of the Byzantine Empire. And during the Opium War, my best friend from middle school is there, wearing a brilliant quju, hair done like Marie Antoinette and I watch as the coiffure rolls down the steps of an Aztec pyramid. It leaves a bloody trail and melts into an Impressionistic work of art, blurry lotuses and mist and fog and within Joseph Conrad's words, I see you.

Everything stops, the world is frozen and I push aside the leafy branches and walk towards you, but a vine snakes around my ankle and I'm falling. The stars twinkle as the galaxy swallows me and I defy gravity and physics, but you're still there, not by my side. Lauridsen and Chaminade write a duet in a pagoda and I see you and all the times we've been together. We dance down arpeggios but an F# pierces my heart as you slide away through the glissando. We're flying kites and running after them and I'm chasing you. You're the angel with horns, I'm the demon with a halo and the moon weeps as we make love. I'm splattered with silver droplets and we're kissing in the rain. You smell like thunder and my veins tingle with lightning, like it has been since the beginning of time- le temps de l'amour. And we're roasting marshmallows until they turn into black charcoal and your tongue leaves scorch marks on mine. I melt in your arms because you are fire and after you mold me into your ideal, you set me aside to cool. And I wish there's more of these little moments that I can hold in my palm and disperse them like dandelions in the wind so that there are bits of you and I wherever we go. We can sow the world and let trees grow from our ashy remains so that when I wake up the next day, there'll be life even though we're over. 

The film is still playing and I see you everywhere; past, present and future; until we burn and fade in the sunset.

But for now,

Ave