I found a picture of us next to a bouquet of dead Amaranths. I was smiling shyly, while you were caught in a blinding smile. 

 I remembered. I remembered that was when I first fell in love, when I laid eyes on your smile. I would always try to find things to compare your smile to. Nothing did it justice. The delicate feathers and roses couldn’t compare to the gentleness and tenderness of how you smiled, the curvatures of the most beautiful handwriting couldn’t compare with the curves of your lips, the rich velvet couldn’t compare to the softness my own lips felt when I kissed you.

I looked at the faded picture again, taking in the full frame of your face. I remembered. 

I remembered how your eyes seemed to glimmer like a thousand shattered crystals, which twinkled and sparked like a nest of stars.I remembered how you cut your beautiful  hair short. I remembered your little quirks and hobbies, how you used to bake, how you used to sing with a voice gifted from God, how you used to relieve my loneliness. 

I remembered how we went to the edges of ecstasy together, how we thought we found the answers. 

I remember the beauty of it all.

But the pain comes shortly after; brief and broken. After all these years, I can still remember the sleepless nights and the bottomless oceans of anguish. The loneliness - the horrible, terrible loneliness that had me teetering on the edge of a chasm of despair so deep and wide. I remember the times where I would’ve sacrificed every hour of my remaining lifetime just for a look, a few glimpses of your smile,  of your eyes, of you. 

But I know you’ll never smile again, much less open your eyes.

That's the catch, that's what the books and the poems don’t tell you about fate. We are told to trust and follow the red strings of fate, but we are never told what to do if a string is cut.