After the heart stops there are seven minutes of brain activity left. Seven minutes, where the brain plays back movie memories of what shaped it – like a homage to the organ, like a final goodbye to the restless dreamers that lived by it, and to the unwavering capacity by which they loved through it.
During the first minute, I saw you. I saw you as if it were the first time, and my god you were perfect. I saw the coy smiles, the terrible dance moves and the genuine laughter. I saw you lean in for our first kiss. I saw me beaming on my way home, spellbound thinking, “This is something big. This is going to ruin me.”
Minute two and three. I saw the flicker of our flame. I saw the way your bones played with the moonlight. I saw the letters you wrote me, scrawled in graphite along the surface of my skin. I saw the man you were trying to become, the awe-inspiring man you were working towards. I saw the clock, as we counted down the days, gripping tighter and tighter within our false reality, until I saw the goodbye.
Minute four, and five. I saw the hurt. I saw it riddled across your face like a cold sweat. I saw the last embrace, and the heaviness that came with having to let go. I saw the confusion, the need to simply make sense of what we had shared, of what we didn’t want to give up on. I saw the scramble within both of our souls, the human parts of us trying to make up the miles, trying to fit the world into a shoebox so we could fill the void. In minute six I saw — the suffering.
But before I knew it, I met minute seven, and despite all of the hurt, all of the feeling, all of the unanswered questions – I saw the communion of hues, the colours of every sunset I had ever witnessed, come together to build the contours of your face. I saw the purples of your under eyes, I saw the whites of your teeth. I saw the pinks of your lips, and the reds that made up the flush in your cheek. I saw the man who shaped me, the man who dug my heart up like dinosaur bones. I saw you whisper goodbye, and it was then, only then, in the beauty of your night sky, that I finally moved on.