At first, you were situated in space within a single, cosy column of air, your pockets empty, wrists braid-braceleted, hearts brimming; the ether pillar fortressing your synchronous, collective exhalations tinctured with the spells of forever inseparability and inexhaustible love, an infinity-housing capsule in space, a bunker impervious to the ever-advancing battalion of time, or so you thought. You blinked once, and your unpoppable bubble revealed itself constituted otherwise. 

The first cleaver of time axed through your safe sanctuary. The pillar, instead of deflecting off its rainbow-filmed, gelatin-walled, impenetrable casing the attack, without resistance and as if made of mundane, frail metal and not the invisible, unpierceable, etheric element you imagined, lets the heavy blade through with a treacherous, tinny clang. Its impact rent right through its malleable middle. The next thing you knew, each of you hung off a different tine of the resultant fork, the backs of your frocks fishhooked at its iridescent, metallic tips, your pockets still empty, wrists still braceleted, hearts still brimming. 

Reminiscing about your magical pillar of entwined breaths, visions, and dreams, all rosy, robust, and radical, became your native tongue to survive the bleeding distance, your talisman to clutch tight as the ant army of time screened the air between you. At first translucent and inconvenient muslin mesh-like and then obfuscating and defiant, thicker and thicker metal grating-like. It drove the perches of your tines in space farther and farther apart from each other until the amulets of your commingled memory retrieved and spiffed up occasionally were the only proofs of history; of you- having split from the same numinous kernel in the womb of space once upon a fantastical time. 

Though you were sure the soap-bubble shiny girth of your original pillar was bound by a one-of-a-kind spell, you had reason to suspect the enchantment had leaked out. It no longer existed as it once did after it brambled into thinner and longer and flimsier daughter wires splaying out and away, like a lush head of grass. 

You convinced yourselves in private, in your minds, the sparse, hairy, anchoring underground roots were all that mattered. But then you couldn’t explain why as time grew bulwarks where, once were wire fences and stone walls, your pockets grew heavier with clickety, chatoyant pebbles reminiscent of cold, cat eyes; or why your bracelets, besides growing out of fashion and their innocent primes, also faded and frayed open and unfastened themselves from around your fattening, watch-strapped wrists, the hairball of their pastel threads ending up at first in a keepsake case at the back of your valuables one day and then the bottom of a waste bin on an unassuming next. And why your hearts now only echoed unintelligible murmurs like the last gasps of a dying brook, faintly, sporadically, and in humble mirroring of the other, performatively, only on command, only with effort, and always with a smidgen of escalating ennui, a ballooning dollop of disenchantment.

About the Author:

Neethu Krishnan is a writer based in Mumbai, India, who writes between genres. She holds an MA in English and an M.Sc. in Microbiology, and her work has been curated in 35+ international literary venues, including The Spectacle, Prairie Fire, The Four Faced Liar, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net poetry nominee, Bacopa Literary Review Creative Nonfiction Award winner, and 2024 Erbacce Poetry Prize longlisted poet. You can find her @neethu.krishnan_ on Instagram and her works at https://neethukrishnan.carrd.co/.

Feature image by Fast Studio on Unsplash