It’s strange to think that the person you’re going to marry is somewhere out there, eating lunch in a subway station or spilling coffee on their dress slacks only five minutes before they have to leave the house for work, or looking in the mirror and hating what they see. Who knows how many mouths they’ve kissed, how many people they’ve slept with, but eventually, like a Ferris wheel returning to its starting point, they will always point back to you.
There are so many cities in this world and so many buildings, thousands of skyscrapers with people in them like little tiny ants, staring down from their glass windows and wishing they could be somewhere else. 10,000 daughters smoking one last cigarette with their dying mothers after so many years of saying no; they fall back into their old habits because they know there’s only one more time to do the things they loved with their parents. Their parents, who will be dead and in the ground, and sometimes these daughters or these sons have to pre-plan their parents’ funerals and pick out the right color of caskets, when really, who will even notice what color the casket is? It could be midnight blue or hot pink and the mourners would be too teary-eyed to tell the difference.
And so many teenagers making love for the first time in hotel beds or on rooftops, awkwardly, sweetly, some forgetting condoms, others making the conscious decision not to use them. Clumsy at first; they’ll be afraid of showing one another their skin, but soon they’ll fall into a rhythm, like the ocean waves figuring out how to touch the shore gently after so many months of tsunamis.
Some of those teenagers will get pregnant and go on to have round, glowing bellies, and their children will grow inside them like pearls inside the shell of an oyster, lives going in and out of the world all the time. And someone somewhere is getting drunk at a party or getting stoned alone in a guest room, heavy with the weight of the world. Sometimes the world is just a cross that we all have to bear, a cross so heavy that we bend beneath it, our backs low to the ground. Someone sitting in a car by themselves at night, underneath a streetlight, closing their eyes and wishing to be somewhere else.
There is someone right now who could be Skyping you or holding your hand or traveling halfway across the world just to see you, or looking up at an approaching asteroid at the exact same moment you are. There are millions and billions of combinations and intersection points for every human being, and at every given intersection point, there is the possiblity of you and one another human being.
So many bodies that could have come together like puzzle pieces but never found their way to one another, so many hands that could have touched but didn’t.