past lives (draft)

it was as if we had met in past lives, probably in more than one.

although we had arrived in the first few days of spring in Paris, the city seemed to whisper to me that we had been here before. it was her first time here and the streets were beginning to shed their coats of thick ice from the winter. she seemed to bring with her enough life to return the colour to the cherry blossoms that ran along the river south towards Montmartre.

it didn't take us long to tender our way to the Riviera, escaping the yellow haze of the streetlights for the cool blue waters of the Med. a spring like this was an invitation for me to find love in places and people I shouldn't, and that's exactly what was to come.

it was a feeling that I couldn't and didn't need to define. I was drawn to her in the same way that stars drew colours from Van Gogh on still nights. I was drunk on the wonder that simmered in her cool eyes before the rain came and the floor glimmered under the moonlight. I was lost in the days that we spent on what felt like borrowed time, time from another life that I felt in my heart but would never really understand.

time spent by the beach reading passages from books and pieces of my writing until the clouds came and the wind blew heavy from the south. games of cards until the moon fell deep over the ocean, my hands on her thigh, her hands in my hair.

how you were beautiful in the morning light with the sun on your face and the wind on your back. how you looked like the girl who had never been loved and I looked like the boy who had loved a little too much.

how I basked in the sunlight of your eyes in moments that you let me in, and drowned in the tears of a thousand sleepless nights in the moments that you shut me out. how I looked at you in those hours as if they were the last on earth and watched you look at me with an expression that was as uncertain as chance.

in another life we were meant to be something, we were meant for more, and all I wanted to know was that when the time came and somebody asked if you had ever been in love, what would you say?

now here we were again on a road that leads to nowhere, a fire that I started, the hand that you played. in love with the way you were, the way we were, and the way that you used to be.

calm eyes, a more delicate laugh, so much wonder, yet so much ruin. older now but still the same in ways that stood beyond the bounds of time.

maybe all that was meant for us in this life was to guess at what might have been meant for us in the next. to yearn at the kiss that we never stole, to find solace in the words that were never said, and to leave this place that we were.

stuck somewhere between the past and the future,

stuck somewhere between always and never.