It had been, always, long days and long nights and vast drought-ridden deserts and vast treacherous oceans and time and space and sand trapped in glass perpetually falling and hands running races on a circular track forever and ever and ever. It had been, always, words, words, words kept in bottles and jars like forbidden potions and desperate messages dropped in the sea by swashbuckling pirates, and mythical heroes, and young girls who were truly happy, and other things that might not have ever existed, locked away because they contained dangerous secrets and the power to destroy the world.

It had been, always, me and you and never the two of us, not really. The moon and the tides, the song and the dance, the yin and the yang, and not us. At least that’s what I had been telling myself, always, when it was midnight, and I was lonely, and my heart was in your body and away from me, and I forgot how to draw the stars into constellations and I’d set imaginary deadlines and ultimatums and let them fly by like butterflies on migration. It was, always, going to be me and you, a space between us, a division sign, an eclipse, a promise I probably always knew I was going to break.

And now, it is today, and I forget every ‘always’ and instead divide it down to smaller, and smaller units of time, it is today, this hour, this minute, this second, this grain of sand in an hourglass, in a vast drought-ridden desert, at the bottom of a treacherous ocean, where a message in a bottle sits, tossed by waves pulled by the moon. And even in the now, we are strung together by fate, free will, and fantasy. And none of it can be escaped, it cycles around and and around like hands on a clock, and the moon around the Earth, and my thoughts of you around my heart, closing in like a coiling snake, tightening, tightening, tightening, curling in on itself.

And now, it is today, and I shake off the snow of the winter and step out of the shadow of the dark side of the moon, and stand, for the first time in the light of the sun like a young bird warming its wings. And I crawl out of the desert, the spilled remains of a broken hourglass, and stand, the way a phoenix may rise from the ashes, another cycle, another recurrence, a rise after, a fall, after a rise, after a…

And now, it is today, I light myself on fire to stand among the tulips and tiger lilies and dare to break the cycle. I’m opening up jars of secret messages, and mystic potions, and words I wish I’d said. And finally in the light of the sun, jars and bottles and hourglasses open, pouring their contents into the world and what starts as a few discordant whispers evolves into an angelic choir all at once saying the one thing I wish I’d said, finally, finally, finally: words, incredible, freeing words:

“I Love You...”

And I rise

And I fall

And I rise

And I fall in love

And we are here, we are now, together, engulfed in a bright, beautiful, blissful blaze that all the water in all the world’s oceans could not drown, and all the sand in all the world’s deserts could not smother. We take the hourglass and set it on its side so that the sand may rest.

Halfway in the past,

Halfway in the future,

And like us,

Perfectly in the present.

Now

and

Always.

Anastasia Dziekan is a senior. After graduation she plans to attend Ursinus College for English and Secondary Education. Outside of writing, she enjoys performing magic and she serves as the president of the North Penn High School Comic Book Club.