Oh hello friends. This is my first ever published piece. Please be kind.
If they had had time, they may have become friends. Good friends, old friends, not those just who share a mutual respect of one another - although that goes without saying - but those who truly know one another. Know about mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, childhoods and homelands and hopes and dreams, or lack thereof. Friends who can recall stories and shared memories. Friends who learn each other's strengths and weaknesses.
Friends who truly know one another.
They fall to their knees in the sand, powder soft and fine, a terrible flash in the horizon and they turn their heads. Pure white. All sound is sucked into its centre, everything is perfectly silent for a split second, before it rushes outwards in a menacing, thundering echo.
Of course, if they had had time, they could have been something more than just friends. They could have been ... something. They could have grown together. Battered souls like theirs, who live on the tails of the breeze, tend to gravitate towards one another in life; seek each other out, tie together their ragged ends to form something whole.
If they had time, he could have felt the weight of her gaze on him, for entirely different reasons. Heard her call his name, for entirely different reasons. Traced the line of her lips, her cheek, her neck ... She could have done the same, fingertips along his jaw, stubble rough against the pads of her fingers, learned the scars across his chest, and those deeper within him, all his sharp and jagged edges.
Their hands find each other, fingers intertwining. The air is hot, it shimmers around the epicentre of their destruction, shaking the very core of them. It's he who pulls her off her haunches, but she comes willingly. Their arms encircle each other as they crush chest against chest. His ribs burn and her bones ache. The water near their knees begins to recede, ebbing slowly at first, then sucking away all at once. It never returns, but the sound comes, unrelenting, hurtling towards them, roaring like a terrible wounded beast.
No, time has never been on their side.
Not from the start, and not now.
And when they reach for each other, whatever they are, whatever they could have been, it doesn't matter now.
They are here.
Together.
At the end.
And that's enough.
That's enough.