By Shace
Nothing can ever alter fate. It is fixed, steady—never changing—unfazed by action, precaution, cause and effect.
It is predetermined, definite as the waves clasping together in the sea and rolling into the sandy shores, seeping, thrusting into every grain of sand to wash away the footsteps, the memories.
The waves are always there, always the same. Fate is like the sky, permanent, sometimes blurring into the horizon with ribbons of white, and sometimes dull and overcast on bad days.
It's like the breath you take, each time measured and counted by the wind's delicate fingertips.
Fate isn't like the moon, shifting into halves or scarcely illuminated on cold December nights. But sometimes when you're all alone, or when your emotions surge into your chest like the quiet fall of rain favored by such intensity, you wish it'd be.
You wish it'd be like promises, because promises change and sometimes you forget them like crumpled leaves on the cold autumn ground. And Autumn, Autumn reminds you of things many, of things you refuse to believe were real because they feel so long ago that they seem like lies strung together to befit a fairytale.
You remember boyish fingers weaving into your own, and when they did it felt like forever was in the palm of your hand, held in the breath of a moment that for a while you barely thought of the consequences of the future, of the implausibility of promises.
But all that's a memory now, retention you vehemently choose to hold onto because in the space of your scant recollection, that's the only whisk of happiness you can ever recall, or maybe the only thing you choose to recall.
You remember it so clearly that the memory is sure to have been burned like ugly unfading scars into your mind, complemented with nail marks scraped into the tenderness of your skin.
Promises are like the sun; sifting through cotton colored wisps of clouds in the sky, bronze blending into the seamless horizon touching the earth. Sometimes it's there, most especially on summer days. And sometimes—sometimes it isn't. Sometimes on days when the weather is dreary and tedious it forgets to shine, instead hides behind rain clouds, shying away from the world.
He whispered solemnities into your ear—careful words of promises, and maybe even a fragment of affection—beneath a tree you know so well.
You were seven.
You were young.
And when a pink petaled bloom drifted into the breeze and touched the ground, somehow you felt that all the sweet lies he said were really true, that everything in the world will take its own course but leave the both of you unchartered by tomorrow's cruel hands.
He said he'd protect you.
Forever.
But forever is too long and endless. Fate cannot outlast it nor can it constrain it into static articles like lined books on a shelf, filmed with dust.
Fate brings you to and end.
It is fleeting, final.
Years later after seasons came and went—the routine turn of the earth— the waves are still the same, the sand unchanged and the tree in full bloom. Your feet take you back to that place, and with the maddening thumps of your caged heartbeat, you wish that come back into the subtle memory of him smiling at you.
Then, then you see him again. But he's not the same. And that falters the smile off of your face, slapping you with a brutish sting because of your pettiness—the belief that he is constant as the sky.
He has changed. Like promises thrown into the touch of the breeze, he's forgotten the stroke of your fingers, the vows. But he still remembers you—and that was almost tolerable—except that fate decided to put you in uneven circumstances, and detract the both of you from the past you shared.
He chooses to play destiny—and you laugh despite the pain because he is not God, he cannot decide his life on his own. But he did, and now you know that sometimes life isn't really easy and light is tainted by the tiny streaks of darkness that aren't really seen by the naked eye.
You still love him—the same unwavering way you did years ago— and you wonder when you watch the familiar drizzle of pink curved petals circling lightly to the ground, you wonder if he still remembers the love.
Because you do.
Clearly.
Fin.
