Nothing belongs to us; it passes through us.
A magnifying glass can braid sunlight into a narrow, concentrated point, compressing what was already there until heat becomes inevitable. The heat burns and it is not a surprise; it is the law asserting itself once conditions are right. Sometimes the universe narrows the same way: to the width of two heartbeats, to the moment when the membrane between two human beings thins until it is almost imperceptible.
Something convenes. Charged. Unnamed. Unmistakable.
An impulse arrives—surprising in its gentleness, shocking in its clarity—to reach out. To touch. To say, without words: I will walk beside you for a stretch of uncertain road ahead. Not as a contract. Not as a forecast. Just for now.
A miracle, a hand extends. Fingers curl into fingers—tentative at first, then certain-unremarkable only because it happens to you.
You arrive without having earned the right, without having proven readiness, without having agreed to the terms. Breath enters you. Being born is a gift. Falling in love is too. The particular flame that sparks between two souls, the sudden understanding that the road grows less lonely when traveled together—this is the rarest gift the universe offers.
You do not conceive this as a gift. You imagine it as coincidence, chemistry, luck. You think it happened because you were ready, because this is what was supposed to happen next.
The path you began traveling is not because you chose it—choice implies a grand design—but because something more honest occurred. You decided not to walk alone. Yet you walk as if time were a shy child trailing behind, barely noticed, easily dismissed.
The route you follow is not drawn on any map. It twists through small mysteries: the way one of you laughs from the throat instead of the mouth, the way the other falls silent before saying anything that really matters. Streetlights lean in like patient witnesses. Shop windows throw back reflections, catching you both at odd angles, as if to remind you are never quite who you think you are when seen through someone else’s eyes.
For a rare few, this accidental hitching of souls lengthens into years. You build a life the way sediment builds a shoreline: slowly, invisibly, without ceremony. Burnt toast and over-steeped tea on workday mornings. The hush of a room where one of you reads while the other has already fallen asleep.
Nothing monumental. Nothing history would bother to record.
Still, these trivial moments harden into a shoreline you can walk with closed eyes, trusting the familiar give of sand beneath your feet—the recurring shells, the recognizable driftwood of shared jokes. A thousand small decisions accumulate into a life: to stay, to try again, to choose each other once more. You build a nest not of twigs and mud, but of something invisible and durable—a home shaped inside each other’s soul.
These are something to be grateful.
You scroll instead of listening. You detach instead of staying. You postpone gratitude. You walk away from the ordinary miracle of being met, believing it will wait for you to return. You assume attention is recoverable, presence something you can make up for.
Among all commotions you do not think about time.
You begin inside it, as if it were a given—like air, like gravity, like the way morning follows night without explanation. You believe there will be time later. Time to say what was left unsaid. Time to notice what you overlooked. Time to repair what you deferred.
After all, you tell yourself, there is plenty of time left. Which record ever guaranteed this?
— Continued, page 2 —