The city is big.
Yet, not big enough that you would never tire of it.
There are two souls who have tried on the city just like new clothes
and decided it’s not for them.

On one end of the city is a writer
who has exhausted words to describe the world around her.
On the other end of the city is a thinker
whose thoughts can wrap around the city itself twice and a half times.

Should it be true, as folklore dictates,
that a strand of invisible red string finds its way
to wrap around destined soulmates and preordained lovers,
then so be it that a crimson line spans the arm of the city.

They find their way to each other
tracing words and trailing thoughts
predicting phrases and reading minds
at parties of the night and strolls of the noon.

The more time the writer spends with the thinker,
the more words she packages away to gift him.
The more time the thinker spends with the writer,
the more thought he puts behind the words that roll off his tongue.

The thinker considers the notion of ‘love’.
He asks himself how he can possibly recognize love
when many deceivers have masqueraded under that name before.
He concludes that some questions aren’t meant to be answered.

The writer has spent a decade sculpting love through letters.
This time around, she is unable to do the same.
She realizes then, when you have truly, completely, and utterly fallen,
there are no words under the clouds of heaven to outline that feeling.

The thinker contemplates the concept of ‘forever’.
He gauges the feasibility of removing the batteries from every clock in the world,
the possibility of trapping him and the writer inside of a singular moment,
where no hands move except for theirs.

The writer pens the things she wants to last forever:
Echos of laughter from ridiculous inside jokes under streetlights,
the soft glow of the moon from the night their lips first brushed,
embraces of phantom limbs from temporary absences.

And just as much as the thinker refuses
to ever think about another person the same way he does her,
the writer refuses to lay their story down on paper
because every story—she has been told—comes to an end.

It is by some miracle their thoughts and words intersected,
that they can dance on an abstract tightrope
stranded in space
scattered in time
on and
on
and on…