This Can’t Be How It Ends
I used to love drowning in the fate narrative.
I would write in all my nauseating poems about the strings that tied me to you, our tangled roots, and the invisible force that kept me crawling back. This is the height of romance! I would think to myself, tossing clichés onto the screen and basking in my perceived originality.
I did feel those strings, plagiarized though the idea may be. They tugged at me constantly and with surprising strength.
You and I spent a whole year knotting ourselves into one entity. We tucked, weaved, knitted, braided, and crocheted our strings. We spun promises into them and tied them tight and comfortable. The strings were so fortified with young love, and we believed they would never break or stretch. I loved the way we tended to them, like a garden between us. They connected me, too, to the idea that something extrasomatic and powerful had drawn us together and would ultimately be responsible for our parting.
Now I think fate is too nebulous for certainty. I say I loved drowning in it because it let me retain my helplessness, which I much preferred to claiming responsibility. I cherished it as a scapegoat for the guilt I harbored on account of ending our high school fairytale as soon as we left for college. We weren’t meant to survive across the miles, I would tell myself to justify hanging up the phone that day, but I recalled my mom’s message as I biked home from his house on moving day weeks earlier — “love is stronger than distance” — and found her words resonated and echoed for years after.
The strings were real — not scientifically proven, perhaps, but emotionally substantiated. I carried this fact with me just as I carried the strings. They became elastic and burdensome, always extending and pulling taut and springing back to life in waves as we jump-roped into a cycle of talking and avoiding, making and breaking contact. I was careful to step around the strings. I brushed myself off when I tripped on them.
With fate as a creature of theory rather than fact, I had to confront the idea of choice. How else would we have ended up — almost ritualistically — meeting one another, spilling confessions of warmth like spilling our coffee drinks on the same table in the corner of the same café?
I see the scissors in my hand for the first time. I press the edge lightly to the strings that tie to you, unthreatening and tentative. I have been holding these scissors for years now. I know the flick of the wrist that will make you drop from my life. I know that your disappearance from my thoughts will be slower, like removing a tattoo. I know. I was born into a scrapbooking family. I know how to wield a pair of scissors. I know our strings won’t hold under the metal. Love is stronger than distance, but it’s no match for two sharp blades.
Here is the only reliable path from me to you. I choose to keep the reminders of you in my drawer, at the forefront of my memory, and I choose to search for traces of you in the clouds and soil. I choose to keep the strings intact. They writhe and burn and threaten as you — four thousand miles away — toy with the idea of finally slicing at them with your pocketknife, and I pray to the fickle orchestrator of fate — this can’t be how it ends.
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