Danielle

What is a life? A collection of memories? A series of glorious highs and heartrending lows? Is it a purpose, cumulative or singular? Or is it something more? Something beyond what is tangible or immaterial? Something beyond even what is found within us. Is it a million little touches? A thousand laughing smiles? Hundreds of shed tears and dozens of stolen kisses on a few desperate sighs? Is it the thread of yourself that you leave behind in those around you? The lives you're unknowingly fated to change simply by existing.

Everything in life has a price. Nothing is ever freely gifted. The universe always comes, whether in the brightest, cheek-aching second of the day or the darkest, most plaintive hour of the night, to collect its payment. To rattle and shake your world. To slither into the illusion of Eden painted by strokes of lies and deceit. And I had left the door open for it, welcoming the thief into my house to steal what was dearest to me. Even if I had done every unthinkable, irrational, detestable thing to prevent it.

I fell in love with them thirty-five million heartbeats apart and an ocean away. One shaped me at the scratch of a pen and the other remade me with the strum of a note. And the truth is that I loved them both, desperately. I never foresaw our worlds colliding. How the past and present would crash together and leave us with nothing but a blinding kaleidoscope of pain. How the threads of all of our fates were already so inextricably intertwined from the moment of those first meetings.