Cosmic Countdown

I sneaked a quick glance at my wristwatch. 5 past 6, and this was accentuated by the shades of the setting sun that colored the horizon in brilliant oranges and checkered reds. I wish I could freeze this moment in time, gaze on at the twilight-lit expanse that would blanket us tenderly, as I put an arm around her shoulders and never let her go. But like all utopian desires that've almost never come to fruition, this wouldn't either, and I pulled myself out of my reveries somewhat reluctantly. She was right in front me, in this very moment, tangible and real.

"Hey. I'm here." 

She jolted to motion, almost as if she hadn't previously heard me walk all the way up the winding stairwell with the echoes of my choppy sneakers reverberating over and over again until they melded into one another. Maybe she genuinely hadn't, with her habit of being completely engrossed in her musings whenever something would particularly worry her pretty little head. I chuckled lightly to myself. She tilted her head in faux amusement, and beckoned to me. I walked up to her and positioned myself snugly beside her, her face once again looking on over the rows upon rows of buildings below and my eyes settled stably on the silhouette of her slanted face.

"Why did you come?"

"Your text.... It was just a tacit Goodbye but you know I couldn't just let you be after a message as cryptic as that. What exactly are you up to?"

She let out an airy sigh, then turned to face me. "It's the same building, the same place, and the same time interval. Is anything still up for debate or are you just choosing to ignore the contextual clues? Maybe you're just slow?", she grinned cheekily, as if she hadn't just implied that she was here to jump to her death.

This building had been home to at least a dozen incidents of lovers jumping to their deaths, hands held, minds made, kickstarted by a certain case of a girl and a boy who claimed to have seen the God of Death, Thanatos, in their very last moments right before their fates subsided. There was something morbidly romantic and curious about this entire ordeal, of wanting to stay tethered to the love of your life as you chose to freeze your lived experiences in time and submit yourself to the Higher beings that claim to be looking upon us from the heavens. 

I didn't know if I liked the idea of it, because I fancied the feel of blood pulsing through my temple and holding her hand to feel the calluses on her fingers against my palms. But she found Death fascinating, and I had always found it odd and off-putting. I never really paid any heed to it though, because I'd just assumed it was a fleeting fixation. But as I let the biting drift wash over my face, the dots involuntarily connecting themselves in the recesses of my mind, the pool of unease I'd been feeling for a while now expanded in volume and a frown made its way to my mouth.

She seemed to notice it, her eyes twitching momentarily as she opted silence. I spoke first.

"I can't do it. This is preposterous."

"This is the ultimate display of love, is it not? To die with the light of your life looking into your eyes, their hand in yours."

"I can't choose to love you in Death if the alternative is seeing you everyday, feeling your cheek with my fingertips, knowing you're here with me in a palpable sense."

"Do you not know that this existence is only illusionary and limited by time?"

"I choose to spend this time, however limited, with you in life as we know it."

As I choked these words out, I could feel a knot swelling up in my throat. She smiled at me for a second, then turned towards the now darkening sky. I gazed at her as hard as I could, an urgency in my vision that I couldn't keep in check as I tried to commit the soft edges of her face and the moles that graced the side of it to memory. She clasped my hand.

"If my words cannot compel you, can your love for me do it instead?"

I couldn't bring myself to answer her. Images of a younger her flashed at lightning intervals through my head, seeing her for the first time in the arcade next to school and feeling an inexplicable longing when our eyes gradually met. The first time I talked to her, the first time we skipped school to hang out under the bridge next to her house. The first time she played me a melody on her guitar, the first time I read her one of the countless poems I had written in her stead. The first time I kissed her, and realized I couldn't imagine a life divorced of her presence. I knew in this moment that I would agree to anything she asked of me because her existence defined mine. I tightened my grip on her hand and she smiled again. 

"Into the night, here we go."

What followed was a sudden imbalance in my bodily pressure, a flicker of blinding light accompanied by the feeling of her hand, rough and callused, in mine. I was floating, in space, in time, and she was right next to me in this bubble of muted sensations. My mind was blank, her presence the only beacon of light in the abyssal void I seemed to be frozen in. 

I couldn't feel my material body any longer. It was as if I had reverted back to being a unicellular creature in the fabled primordial soup, the remnants of my memories from life in the tangible world slowly collapsing away with every minute that passed us by. 

Something called out to me. I strained every last bit of my senses to focus on this apparent signal, and observed what lay in front of me. The view was picturesque.

I hadn't previously paid any attention to the said bubble I found myself in but as I now tried digesting it, the feeling of awe was painfully overwhelming. We were in a pitch-black container that continued on infinitely in all directions, unhelmed, immovable, an expanse of sharp somberness that threatened to swallow you whole and mold you anew. Millions of sparkling stars dotted this canvas of black, some pristine white, some yellow and glowing in intensities that rivalled each other's. I felt like I was in a snow globe, and I lost all coherence and command over my feelings while I looked on, my senses simultaneously brimming with grief over my now lost physicality and euphoria over finding myself in the ever-loving, abyssal cradles of the Universe.

I looked to my side, in hopes of seeing her and gauging her emotions too, wanting to thank her for freeing me along with her and introducing me to this near-orgasmic flurry of feelings that I wouldn't otherwise have known. But there was nothing next to me. The limitless vacuum stared back at me as I at it. Terror. Is that what I'd started to feel?

A booming voice broke through my internal monologue and demanded rapt attention from my side.

"You've been caught in the tangles of time and space, timekeeper. You are now a mere idea entrenched in the sands of history, and the love of your former life continues to be bound to you by an invisible string that can decidedly self-preserve depending on the circumstances you sacrificed yourself to me in."

".....Who are you?"

The formless voice laughs, a rumbling heave that seems to shake all of the stars to their very core. 

"I am Thanatos. You're not the first to have longed for eternal salvation that'd grant you and your lover prophetic tranquility, nor will you be the last." A resounding chuckle follows. "Your intertwined tales have only just begun to take shape, after all."

A piece of me resonates with a delicate sensitivity towards something in the far-off distance. I feel a pair of callused fingers brush against my closed eyelids. I exhale.

"Into the night, here we go."