Shatter

by: epiphanies

I know, its been forever. School has eaten my life.

There is just something beautiful about those moments.

You know, those moments. Those ounces of time that just take...that. Sometimes it seems slow, slower than breathing, slower than twelve dozen heartbeats, but sometimes not. Sometimes it's fast, like five hundred horses battling for the first prize.

Those moments come and go far less than they did before. It seems that now, now, in these days, they are so far behind in what they used to be. They used to happen every few hours, or at least once a day or once a week. Something new would come to mind every time I looked at you. Something fresh would bloom, something brisk would whisk me away in the wind and make me forget all about the previous moments. Those beautiful little moments.

I never had any of those moments with anybody other than you. They were yours, and mine. They were ours, except there never ended up being an ours like we planned. Ours has turned into mine and yours, hers and his, not theirs and...ours.

We own different silver, we eat off different china. Our clocks aren't synchronized. Our children don't have names we both like. Those moments only come every few years, when we run into each other at the market or the meetings, and even then. Loss.

It's more painful every time our eyes meet, because every time they meet, it's another moment. Those moments should last forever - like the moment in the astronomy tower, or the moment in the garage, or the moment in the garden, or the moment - moments - in the dungeon. They should last forever. They could have, if things had been...not the way they are. Different, in some lovely way. If something had changed, if the process had gone awry somehow. We could have had those moments every day, like we used to.

Professor Snape used to roll his eyes at us, and Umbridge patted our heads to our disgust and said, "What pretty offspring you two will have." You held my hand the day your father was put into prison, and I kissed your cheek on the day of our graduation. The day before our separate marriages to the causes we both shared.

The moments are still there, when our eyes meet. We remember them, and so they stay in one piece. The most precious things we have in life are the moments, but also they are the most sturdy. They will never shatter, and one day we will visit them again.