Disclaimer: Not mine.


NEW DISEASE

In after times, it will be said that time stopped as I took her hand in mine, that time ceased to matter.

That is not how I would describe it. For in that fraction of a moment as our hands first touch and I look upon her, I come to know many things, things which were hidden to me before. I know now that she is the fairest of the fair, the only one who could ever sing in a voice as lovely as the one I heard and knew I must follow. I had thought I knew the splendour of light but now I find the only light by which I can truly live is here; I had thought I knew love, but know now that there was one of an intensity as all-consuming as this; I had thought I knew joy, but I now know what shape it truly takes.

All this, I come to know with a single look at her, in one single heartbeat. But knowledge such as this is of such magnitude that it is only natural that the one moment, the one heartbeat, must be of a great magnitude as well. And so, the moment we share is a heartbeat but to ourselves. For all others, who do not share it, there are more than they could count.

In after days, this will be the moment I will cling to. I will remember the perfection of it and I will try to make this one heartbeat go on, to make every heartbeat be as this one, until it stretches and wears thin and is but a chain on others. I will forget that at this moment, it is something new. I will forget that it was from the darkness I had to come to find what was light.

And I will perhaps not forget, but rather not think of the significance of one more new revelation: the joy of looking upon her and knowing that her heart is filling with the same wonder at this new knowledge as mine.