He did not think of her again.
He left, and he did not remember the way that her eyes shone with wonder, or the way the grass clung to her body like a starving glutton. He did not wonder. He did not imagine the slopes of her hips growing out of straight lines, because the geometry of her body never occurred to him. He did not think of her again. He did not think of seconds as they passed. He arranged the planets in order of his preference, but he did not think about the way the galaxies spoke out in the fractures of her eyes. And he turned hourglasses on end, and did not once wonder about her in the moments between the grains of sand that fell.
He thought about himself, instead. He thought of all the ways that they ruined him. He thought of all the ways that they ruined each other. He watched the moments that they betrayed one another on loop, over and over, until he spoke the sentences in lieu of theirs. He watched the moments that they disintegrated, again and again, until they were all that was left.
But he did not think of her again.
He does not remember her name, or the way that her youth betrayed her in the back of her throat; how her voice became more petulant than she should have wanted, how the inflection rose at the ends of her sentence and left his hair on end. He doesn’t remember the way she said his name, or the way she watched him like he was all that mattered.
He did not think of her again.
But then, in the meadow, between moments and atoms and planets, he sees her.
“Don’t lie,” he says, and there’s a curl in his voice at the end of each word that might make her wonder.
“You’ve waited years for this.” He doesn’t wonder if she’s grown into the being he’s created out of stars, in the stars, for the stars. She’s waited years for this.
He has not
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,