The lights are bright and everything around you is still. Each step you take causes the colors to spill from your heart. Each breath takes in more of those anxieties. Images of them take form in front of you as you push through the empty streets. Light posts melt away as you stride past them and parked cars turn into bright colored roses. The sky turns clouds that hold song lyrics and late night fantasies.

Beautifully crafted compliments getting stirred up with clumsy attempts to seem ‘cool’ as the water starts to race past your shoes. Fires begin to burn in your chest as flood waters climb up to your knees. Doubt engraved bullets barrage past you, taking deep plunges into the now waist-deep water. You stop and slow the waters, stop the bullets, calm the clouds and freezing everything else.

Time holds the back of your head forcing you to look forward. Though your eyes burn deeply, you would not dare close them. Your heart swells up as their smile paints across their face. Breathing becomes shallow and sense of self simply leaves you. With what little energy you have left, your hand raises up and moves back and forth in a wave. They move slowly and let out a sound that fills your ears like honey. You take your first step towards them and with each one after that your heart leaks into your chest.

They take their first steps towards you and as the two energies move closer to each other, the world starts to change. The light posts sprout into large roses that fold open to catch the raining sunshine. Cars start to morph into swans that move to find their souls. The clouds take away from the stage to allow the sun and stars to fill the sky. The flood waters turn to a soft mist that lays gently on your nervous body. Once bullets are now stray electric charges that form from thin air and bounce all around.

You feel the tight hug of their energy as you now stand within arm’s length of each other. Your eyes work from the soles of their shoes, twisting up their figure before landing on their eyes. Once landed, the eyes are locked onto each other, scanning past the fine layer of cells in an attempt to get a quick peek of soul dancing happily inside them. Their hand starts to move through the thick shield of insecurities that you’ve put up over the years and finds home happily pressed against the back of your palm. In that moment, your heart stops and Time snickers snapping her fingers in the playful way she does. Through the stillness of the world around you, they continue to move.

Their lips pucker up and board a train with only one stop on the route. Your eyelids grow heavy and slide shut in unison with theirs. The closer they get the more of the world starts to shatter into shards and fly off into a white void. More and more shards making their quick escape as the lips press into each other causing the remaining world to push violently away leaving you both in an empty canvas of white. You are now alone with them in a world waiting to be painted by its creators. Starting with a large red heart that forms beneath the two of you.

They pull their lips away and offer a small smile before binding their hand with yours and pull you along, sweetly saying.

“Come on, you, we do not have all day!”