Tomorrow Comes

Engaging the quiet stranger. Imagining him a particle of light that she is keeping speed with. Aging slowly as the world around them grows old. The future unfolding in stabs of skin. Slowly separating from the bone.

Particles decaying. A circus of atoms and smaller things. Arranging their thick curtains to obscure the future on the windows between us. Howling dogs and hungry strays. Grunting with purpose through the dark blanket of summer's weight. Nowhere to go. No time to get there.

She writes a letter to her grandmother. Apologizing for having accidentally killed her. She assumes the paradox is self-correcting.

She goes back thinking she has never been to the past. Only to realize she's long been waiting there.

To fulfill the time line she had propagated years from now. A strand of thread through a needle's eye. Convincing the seams in a larger blanket.

A shiver in the cold. A sigh in the heat. Her kiss. A broken crayon. The only evidence of the flesh she's already colored in.

Confessing that she expected she would find herself. She warns the past is not to be changed. There are only particles colliding. Too small to see. And the entropy of a slow future trying to catch up with the urgency of decaying flesh.

Slipping into the bones of a new stranger. She easily dismisses the impending threat of physics. We are free she insists. Even if only to forget.