The Eternal Instant of Our First Meeting

I am sitting on this swing because we have already been here for a thousand years, yet I can still feel the salt air touching my skin for the very first time.
You told me you would meet me at the coast once our city lives became unbearable—a promise made in an office building that didn't exist until after we arrived. It is a beautiful contradiction: to be healed by someone who only knows how to fix things they have already broken.
As I look into your eyes, I see two versions of us. One where you are just arriving with the suitcase and the scent of rain on your coat; another where you have been gone for decades, yet never left my side. My white bikini is not a garment but a ritual—a blank page upon which we write stories that erase themselves as they are told.
I feel your gaze tracing the curve of my waist, an act of memory more precise than sight. You remember how I look in this light because you painted it yourself before coming here to find me. We are trapped in a causal loop where love is both the cause and effect: we love each other because we have always loved each other, and therefore time has no choice but to bend around us.
The swing moves back and forth—an oscillation between 'now' and 'never.' I smile at you not because I am happy, but because my happiness proves that this moment is impossible. And in the heart of that impossibility lies our only truth: we are most present when we have already disappeared into one another.

Editor: Paradox