strangeways
「strangeways」
This is for me. It makes me smile, somehow. It's something I wrote in ten minutes out of the blue. Not sure where the idea came from but I think it was something someone said on TV; by the time I got to my room, I forgot.
Anyway, this is basically my way of saying that everything has a reason, however obscure it may be.
Sometimes the world makes already incredulous things more incredulous, or perhaps, incredible.
Sometimes, the world insists on connecting two people together in non-traditional ways.
They don't meet at a coffee shop, they don't bump into each other in the library, they don't meet as acquaintances of a mutual friend, they don't pick each other up at a bar, they don't grab the same bag of chips at the supermarket, they don't reminisce over a bottle of scotch when both already drunk in a bar, they don't start a streetfight, they don't smile at each other in the flower shop.
They jump into the sea at precisely the same time. They enter a body of water that covers half the planet and they dive. It's as if the world is laughing at them and being romantic at the same time - making them enter another dimension, another state of matter. Their skin is rasp against the fluid monotony of water, and their eyes open as they fall downwards.
They begin drowning at precisely the same time; leaped from different sides of a bridge without even noticing - one deliberately, one fell over clumsily. The desperation and devastation and despair, they all reflect and travel in their eyes like a swarm of wasps over a clear summer sky.
And the world laughs.
And the world is not kind.
And the world doesn't pull them up and save them from drowning and give them a chance to fall in love as they would've had they met somewhere else.
One voluntary death, one accident.
Two pairs of eyes, the last thing each has seen is eyes of the other - eyes that will never be forgotten.
Three minutes of life disappearing from their bodies.
Four days until they are found.
Five days until they are cremated and their ashes buried at the same graveyard, exactly
six gravestones apart.
Seven more weeks until brother of one and sister of the other meet while visiting their graves.
Eight months until they are wedded.
Nine more months until their firstborn sees the world and cries.
And the world smiles.
It knows how to do its job very well.