The Eternal Moment Before We Met

I am standing here, palms pressed together in a prayer that has already been answered by the very act of asking it. He tells me he loves me for the first time—though we have spent three lifetimes doing exactly this under these orange gates.
It is an impossible truth: I only know him because he remembered me from a future where we had never met, yet here we are in the present, breathing synchronized air that tastes of incense and rain. He touches my cheek with fingers that feel like old memories being rewritten in real-time; his warmth is not just skin on skin, but an echo returning home.
I wear this white kimono to signify a beginning, while he wears his urban suit as if fleeing from the end. We are two contradictions colliding at high speed—one of us arriving late for our first date, and the other waiting since before time began.
He whispers that I look beautiful today, but 'today' is a circle we have walked until it became straight. The more he loves me now, the less I remember who I was without him; my healing comes from forgetting myself into his existence.
I close my eyes and pray to be forgotten by everyone except him, knowing that in being remembered so perfectly, I am already gone.

Editor: Paradox