t i m e l e s s
“What is love to you?” she asks him, carefully watching his face as she slips their hands together. She watches the way his eyes soften, the way his brows furrow as he turns his head thoughtfully toward the sky.
He senses her curiosity in the sparkle of her prying eyes, and he decides to answer her question with a question of his own. “What is it to you?”
She hums quietly, gathering his response into the whirlwind of her mind. “To me,” she says, curling closer to him, resting her head against his shoulder. “Love is being with you.”
He gives her hand a gentle squeeze, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “But what if there comes a day when I’m not here?”
Some would think that was the complete wrong thing to say, especially when she tears their hands apart and glares at him with a certain ferocity. “What are you implying?” she snaps, expecting him to cower under the force of her annoyance and apologize for saying something so absolutely stupid.
Instead, he just reaches for her hand again. He delicately takes it in his own, calmly meeting her fiery eyes as he traces lines across the center of her palm.
“I’m not saying I have any intention of leaving you,” he reassures her. “But what if I were to die tomorrow? You wouldn’t get to be with me anymore, but your love for me would still exist, wouldn’t it?”
She nods slowly, the fire in her eyes hardening into an amber of confusion. She looks down, her eyebrows inching together. He places a finger beneath her chin and tilts her head back up, studying the frown on her rosy lips and the sadness in those familiar pools of amber, the ones he can never seem to get out of his own mind.
“What would love be then?” he asks. He’s clearly going somewhere, with his vague ideas and the growing smile on his face, but she’s suddenly overcome with the fear of losing him. She places her own hand on top of his, feeling how the skin on the backs of his fingers is both calloused and smooth. She breathes in his scent, one that distinctly reminds her of cinnamon and pine needles—or maybe that’s just the aroma of the trees that tower around this little wooden bench, and the flavored coffee he holds in his other hand.
He gives her hand another squeeze, reminding her of his presence as she whispers, “I really don’t know.”
The smile never fades from his lips; it’s almost mischevious, like he knows something she doesn’t. She raises an eyebrow at him, not sure how she’s supposed to feel about the way he’s acting. He just implied death on his part, and now he’s smiling like a madman and her chest aches because she’s so in love with him but he can be so ridiculously confusing and she just doesn’t know how to deal with his poetic inferencing.
So she drops his hand onto his lap, folds her arms across her chest and says, “Now it’s your turn to answer the question.”
He laughs, and the wind laughs with him, swirling enthusiastically around their heads and ruffling his soft hair. He stands up and, with the coffee still in his other hand, extends the other one toward her. She takes hold of it, uncertain but curious all the same. He helps her off the bench, and leads her to a nearby tree, which is bursting with shades of brown and orange in the wake of autumn.
“Love,” he says, slowly, pausing as to make sure she’s paying close attention to what he’s about to say. “Is like this tree.”
Her head whips around to stare at him in disbelief. “Sorry?”
“Just hear me out.” He lets go of her hand and places his palm against the trunk of the tree, the delicacy of his flesh meeting the bark’s rough texture. She follows his lead, never taking her eyes off him, waiting to understand the logic in his unclear mannerisms.
“This tree has probably been around for much longer than we have,” he tells her. “Unless someone cuts it down, it’s going to keep growing and growing. Every autumn its leaves will fall, and every spring its leaves will grow back. It has withstood rain, snow, ice; you name it, it’s been through it. It’s been a home to thousands of birds, bugs and squirrels. I’m sure it’s provided shade to a couple of young people in love who wanted to enjoy a picnic. Or maybe, years ago, a little girl tied a tire swing to one of its branches, and it was there throughout her entire childhood as she rocked back and forth and laughed into the breeze. Maybe a different girl and her brother ran away from home, because home was not a good place for them, and maybe they built a hideout at the very top of this tree, where they could be safely hidden behind its leaves, where the yelling they left behind could never reach them.”
She shifts her eyes away from him and examines the trunk of the tree. Its skin scrapes at her own, and she wonders if it inflicts pain to keep everything that lies within safe and untouched. She imagines she can feel a heartbeat deep within the tree, proving that it is alive and worth so much more than humans like her can even begin to think.
“I still don’t get your point,” she says, her voice quieter than she’s used to it being.
“No matter how much the world around this tree changes, the tree itself will always be here,” he continues. “I like to think that’s what love is like. People might leave you, but that doesn’t mean you stop loving them. Love can withstand the worst possible situations, because no matter how hard life can get, love is there to remind you that you can get through it.” He runs his hand down the surface of the bark, and then back up again. Then he drops it down by his side, and she reaches for it.
“So love doesn’t end with a single person,” she says, like she’s beginning to understand. “It doesn’t even end with several people, like a significant other, and your best friend, and your family. It’s more than that, right? It’s more than simply getting to be with those people?”
“Right.” He looks at her, smile widening as it stretches from cheek to cheek. “Love is endless, because it’s always going to be here. It’s present in the things you can touch, and even in the things you can’t see. It outlasts people and problems and everything else in the world. In a way, it transcends time.”
He sips his coffee, and she swears she can see the flash of a lightbulb turning on in his eyes as he decides where to take her next. They walk side-by-side for a while, and as they walk, she focuses on feeling for the love in the chilly evening air. She listens for it in the birds’ sleepy song. As they emerge from the trees and onto an open clearing, she is sure she can see it in the flowers that dot the grass, flowers of each and every color and maybe even more colors than that.
Their hands are still intertwined, molded together like the most unique piece of pottery. She doesn’t ever want to let go, because she can feel the love in the warmth of his skin pressed to hers, and in the steady rhythm of his veins as they pulse inside his wrist.
“Look up,” he whispers, his breath warm against her ear. So she does.
She looks up and her eyes can barely behold the art in the sky. In this moment, she realizes that the sky is more than just an open stretch of space above their heads. It’s a canvas, and painted onto it are hopes and dreams and unmistakable futures. Oranges blend perfectly with pinks, which mix with blues to create a breathtaking color that she can’t even begin to describe. It’s as if someone painted this canvas for each individual person on this earth, so that they would each see it differently and take from it a different message that speaks to them personally, deep down into the cores of their hearts.
Someone painted this sky for her. Someone who loves her.
“Love is like the sun,” he says to her, and he must notice the tears welling in her eyes, because he says it as gently as possible. “It rises with new feelings in the east, and sets with old ones in the west. But no matter what you feel inside of you, and no matter what the world puts you through, you can always count on the sun to shine and bring light into your life.”
This is enough for her, because she finally understands. She turns toward him, and he wipes a stray tear from just above her cheekbone. She cups his face in both hands and kisses him as the sun sets behind the trees, knowing that it will rise again, and knowing that the trees are still there and growing, even in the dark.
“I love you,” she mutters into their kiss, and somehow, she means it differently this time. She realizes she loves him as more than just a person who she gets to be with. No, it’s definitely much, much more than that.
She loves him as someone who is there to remind her of what love really is. Because even if he fails to be by her side tomorrow, she would still remember the way he showed her each color of the setting sun. She would still remember the tree’s heartbeat and the wind that likes to dance wildly through their hair.
Even if things were to start falling apart, she would remember that love is all around her, in everything she can see and touch and in everything she can’t, to help put her back together again.