If Other Worlds Exist

If other worlds exist, if they are layered, one upon the other; in each I am bound to you. In each we are entwined. There are no worlds in which we are not forever being drawn to one another. This is a law of nature, this is an inevitability contained in the birth of all that exists. This is an inescapable consequence of the existence of anything. 

I knew before I knew you.

I knew that the pace had quickened, and that there was another. 

There is a future where I am without you. 

There is a future in which you do not love me; but no future in which I do not love you. 

And in every future, as well as every present, I suspect I am being watched. 

I am watched with indifference, though I have sensed the weight and pressure of a beginning interest pushing against me. When I wake, I feel the atmosphere in the room abruptly change; so subtly, as if my shadow has opened the door and left the room. 

Our angels have been replaced by cameras; our thoughts and movements catalogued utterly and without reprieve. We are forever watched, forever seen. The past no longer vanishes. Memory has left the realm of poetry, nothing is forgotten, nothing is transformed. 

We have lost the slow, dreamy rapture of forgetting.

I live in the city of angels, though I have never seen one, though still, I sense I am being watched. 

The world is consumed by fire just before I wake. I spend the morning holding back tears, holding back a dread, which, if let in, would never leave me. I am forever shoring up the cracks through which it could enter. 

I am in the slowness at the center, where time does not fly. I live a lifetime in your briefest absence, am reborn in the space between your breaths. 

But if I called and you did not answer. If I reached for you and felt only the cold white sheet. And if my pillow loses your scent, or I find the last strand of your hair beneath a table or tucked within the creases of my couch. What would the loss of you look like beyond the obviousness of your absence? How long until your image fades into the fogginess of my imagination. How long until I catch my breath. 

This is all just a fabrication, a fantasy, a story I am just now writing...

The story of the world is nothing but a love story.

The story of the world contains nothing but you.