I don't know if what we're experiencing is the blessing of a second chance to fulfilment, or just another collective illusion. Does it matter? As long as we keep reality at bay, as long as we share this pleasant delusion, dilemmas should never shatter our delicate fable, the intricately painted glass through which we see the world and what we used to call our love.

Now words are heavier, they often seem to linger in a realm between conception and utterance; we mistrust confessions of undying devotion. We let it all dissolve, I guess, into droplets of a thick, bittersweet liquid encompassing our feelings, our needs, eternity and all existence. Thus, here we stand, confused and betrayed, with our childhood dreams forsaken, stolen.

Yet still I scan your eyes for traces of innocence, still I sometimes smell your skin and breathe in serenity. You’ll never read this, you were not meant to ever have the whole of me, nor I the whole of you; others have stumbled upon parts of me you’ll never understand. But you were here, from the start, and that’s what makes all the difference. I should have known.

Ours was not a love story, ours was a butterfly’s lament, a tragedy of fatal explosions and fragmented rainbows, the treacherous chemistry connecting minds and hearts and bodies, before turning everything to ash. It was what happens when aggression meets poetry, when a magnet seduces a compass and the North remains lost forever, notions of direction suddenly rendered obsolete…