I close my eyes and drift to where it’s calm. Where salt wafts and sticks to skin, glimmering over wounds. The hum of a lingering sting; the dead stars from the remains of a lost universe we destroyed in another distant dimension. 

Mossed up panels of a worn down house support the hazy corners of my vision, the waves of a green sea caressing the front porch. A familiar breeze that once met me in another life greets me with each ripple of a step. 

The form of a lost soul plants itself next to the shore, shoelaces caught in the current, straight back spelling the beginning of a sad story, baking under the spotlight and worshipped by a thousand eyes.

The person turns. The tragedy clogs up my throat. 

We meet again.

“You’re here,” The sky chokes up a storm, and I hold onto the strings from your billowing sleeve as the wind nudges me away, to a time before I closed my eyes. 

“Have we met before?” 

“I don’t think so,” You smile, a fringe of the earth shattering into our palms reflecting on your teeth. “In a different world, maybe.”

The wind is still bitter, the air still cold, but in this universe we can walk on water.

“Are we meeting again to atone for our sins?”

“The world is already broken,” Your words are quiet. It gets swallowed up by the sea, set to unravel the next time the world ends. “What’s left to break?”

“Each other.”

A Firefly Visits Me in a Dream

2020

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© Rizu Lu

All Rights Reserved.