Will Time Throw us Together or Tear us Apart?

Sometimes I get lost thinking about time.

How time dances with circumstance and place, brings two strangers together in a dizzying two-step, has them bump into one another, and step on one another’s toes—and suddenly the way two bodies have navigated this earth as separate entities makes no sense anymore.

Because in those fleeting seconds, fate has shifted. Their clocks have synced, and suddenly they’re dancing to a new rhythm.

And time seems to both slow down and rush simultaneously.

That’s the only explanation I have for love—fate and timing. Two people with their own stories and paths and lives intertwining in a matter of seconds. Place and circumstance. Destiny and desire. Suddenly, they’re no longer two separate people, two separate souls, but have joined in that moment and become something more.

Love is incredible, really. How we suddenly find bits of ourselves in other people. How we close our eyes and cannot imagine a world without them in it, as if we haven’t been alive until we saw their faces.

Those feeling of familiarity, of having known them for an entire lifetime moments after meeting them, the intense bond and connection that never goes away, the deep friendship, and the extraordinary, enchanted, deep-seated love.

I love knowing that time, though it never stops, has the power to either rip two people apart or bring two people together.

And sometimes I wonder if it has the power to do that all over again and make us fall head over heals with the same person.

We are a product of time, a product of place. We are a fleeting moment in a crowded room of people. We are unintentional laughs and smiles shared across a street with strangers who are potential lovers or lovers who may become strangers.

We are infinite, tiny moments of time. But when our time runs out because we want different things, different lives, different dreams—we fade like a tired clock in the back of a dusty room, the minute hand slowly dragging on until it finally ceases.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder how our time can stop when the rest of the watches continue forward—when the rest of the world takes no notice of our hearts breaking, and those clocks keep ticking, no thoughts of us at all.

Sometimes I get lost thinking about time. How two people could find one another in the craziness, in the continuance, and yet, somehow fall into their own rhythm. How they could fall apart, even though their clocks were so connected.

And how—and if—they could ever find that same ticking beat again.

Sometimes I wonder if time will ever bring lovers that have been apart back together. Now that so much has happened, now that they’re in two different worlds, now that they’ve been apart for so long—maybe they could fall back into old patterns, and maybe the wear watches with the second hand just a little offbeat.

Or maybe all they need are new batteries to sync with one another again.

But time continues, it rushes, it slows. It used to seem so endless with them. Then so endless without them. And now, it seems steady, right in line with the beating of our hearts.

And I keep wondering, in these quiet seconds, if that beat will ever quicken with the rhythm of theirs again.

Link to Article on Elephant Journal