For Seven Minutes My Heart Stops, And I See You
After the heart stops there are seven minutes of brain activity left. Seven minutes, four hundred twenty seconds, where the brain plays back movie memories of what shaped it – like a homage to the organ, like a final goodbye to the restless dreamers that lived by it, and to the unwavering capacity by which they loved through it.
During the first minute, I saw you. I saw you as if it were the first time, and my god you were perfect. I saw the bad chat, the coy smiles, the terrible dance moves and the genuine laughter. I saw you pick me up and take me into your arms, I saw you lean in for our first kiss. I saw me beaming on my way home, spellbound thinking, “This is something big. This is going to ruin me.”
Minute two and three. I saw the flicker of our flame. I saw the way your bones played with the moonlight, the way your back looked against the night sky as we slept under the canopy of our favorite city. I saw the letters you wrote me, scrawled in graphite along the surface of my skin. I saw the man you were trying to become, the intelligently awe-inspiring man you were working towards. I saw the clock, as we counted down the days, gripping tighter and tighter within our false reality, until I saw the goodbye.
Minute four. I saw the hurt. I saw it riddled across your face like a cold sweat. I saw the last embrace, and the heaviness that came with having to let go. I saw the confusion, the need to simply make sense of what we had shared, of what we didn’t want to give up on. I saw the scramble within both of our souls, the human parts of us trying to make up the miles, trying to fit the world into a shoebox so we could fill the void. I saw the suffering.
Minute five and six. I saw the girl who found you at the right time. I saw how you kissed her with my warmth on your mouth; how you tried to place yourself into her open arms like a jagged puzzle piece that simply did not fit. I saw my hope for you during that time; the impatient and genuine hope that you would be cured of this memory, that you would be able to sleep beside the bones of another without dreaming of a ghost.
But before I knew it, I met minute seven, and despite all of the hurt, all of the feeling, all of the unanswered questions – I saw the communion of hues, the colours of every sunset I had ever witnessed, come together to build the contours of your face. I saw the purples of your under eyes, I saw the whites of your teeth. I saw the pinks of your lips, and the reds that made up the flush in your cheek. I saw the man who shaped me, the man who dug my heart up like dinosaur bones. I saw you whisper goodbye, and it was then, only then, in the beauty of your night sky, that I finally moved on. 
