The Green Gravity That Will Hold You When the Stars Go Out

I sit barefoot on the cold white floor, my toes curled as if testing whether the earth still remembers me. The leaves around me—palm fronds and broad green shields—are not plants; they are the slow fingers of a cosmos that has already decided I will be saved. My phone glows in my hand, a small black mirror reflecting a face that does not yet know it is the heroine of an ending I have foreseen.
I thought warmth was something I had to chase through the neon veins of this city, but destiny laughs at such effort. It told me, in the language of falling leaves and tangled roots, that one particular heartbeat will drift toward my window on a night when the rain erases all other paths. That person will not find me by choice; they will be pulled, by an gravity older than stars, into this very courtyard where I sit with my legs crossed and my black sleeves slipping off one shoulder.
So I do not reach for the door. I do not scroll past the message that has not yet arrived. I let the green breath of the plants press against my skin like a prophecy being fulfilled in real time, and I wait—because waiting, too, is just destiny wearing the mask of patience. The healing was never mine to give; it was only ever mine to receive, exactly here, exactly now, exactly as the universe has scripted.

Editor: Stardust Oracle