Twenty minutes.

Hard to believe only twenty minutes ago my life was normal. Tuesday morning sunshine ruled the morning and the sun sparkled off the Manhattan skyline below my window.

That was before the plane hit.

I saw it happen. I was dumbfounded; I sat at my desk and just watched it get bigger and bigger. I started to say “That is wrong,” but before I could get the words out, it flew into the building, directly below me. WHAM! At least twenty floors down. We all felt the impact, and the fireball that rolled past the windows was so hot that many of them cracked.

We tried to find a way out, but the stairwells were full of smoke and flames. The air grew thick and acrid, and the smell of burning rubber, plastic and flesh was enough to make us all gag. William threw a chair through the window. The fresh air tasted good, but the smoke became a chimney roaring past us. The people below looked very small as we stood on the narrow ledge.

“I can’t burn, man.” That’s all William said to me before he jumped. I wonder what he thought about as he fell. I’ve had time to think a lot; ninety-eight floors is a long, long way down.

I see the ground now, coming up fast.

I love you Mom.

I hope it doesn't—

“I’m quite mad, you know.”

The Hatter stared into the blue eyes of a young woman. He and Alice had met many years prior, when she was just a girl. Now those eyes, still the same large Christmas ornaments they had been all those moons ago, had replaced fright with affection.

“I know,” said Alice. “I’ve known all along.”

“And I’m quite a bit older than you.”

“Why, yes. Of course I’ve thought of that. But you see, you’re stuck in time. One day, I’ll catch up to you.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’ll grow older than you. My hair will turn white, my skin will sag. The youthful girl before you will be no more.”

“Yes…”

“But my eyes? My eyes will always belong to you.”

The Hatter pushed Alice’s hair behind her ear, still golden and full of life. He remembered first meeting her, once in a dream. He had loved her in a different light then. But as her mind filled with wisdom, her heart with passion, and her body with womanhood, the fatherly love quietly, subtly morphed into something else.

He kissed her gently. First, on her head, smelling the fragrant tiger lilies she used to wash her hair. Then, harder, on her bow-shaped lips. He lingered a moment, feeling the coolness of her mouth, letting it spread like a cold cloth on a fever.

“Or perhaps Time will pity a hatter. Pity him something fierce and stop for you, too.”

“Perhaps he will. Until then, you can teach me to grow.”

Alice looked at the man before her. She couldn’t remember a time her heart had been so full. All around, colors swarmed with pastel exhilaration. The blue sky was a painting of Easter morning. Butterflies looked like they had been dipped in paints by clumsy children. The trees and the grass and the flowers danced to the music of her jiving soul. She was deeply, madly, in love.

The romantic relationship of Alice and the Hatter was one best enjoyed in secret. The folks of Wonderland had a real knack for outlandish gossip, so distorted from one person to the next that fact became fiction, and fiction became nothing more than a children’s fairy tale. So the two lovers often stowed away in a rolling field for picnics and love-making. They met so frequently that the field became “their” field, a place known to most but meaningful only to those who used it for magic.

In this field, during timeless hours, they shared their deepest wants and desires. The Hatter longed for a pardon from the Queen. He wished for a home on the outskirts of the kingdom, one to grow old with Alice. And he wished for the ability to grow old. After all, eternity seemed like a very long time.

Alice, not wanting to sound naive, listed off hopes and dreams from a life long ago. She told the Hatter she one day wished to be a teacher of children. “Math and Science and all that.” And she’d like a pet of some sort, but “definitely not a hare or a cat.” Although these things were once her truths, in the depths of all that made up the woman she had become, Alice’s only unvarnished desire was a forever with her Hatter.

But on this particular day, at this particular picnic, during this very particular time of year, Alice felt bare. You see, if time were counted, it would have been one year since the Hatter had first confessed he fancied her and Alice had returned the sentiment. It sparked a fire in Alice so robust and searing that she wished to unzip herself right down the middle and expose any secrets that lingered. So she decided to do just that.

“Hatter, my dearest?” Said Alice, absentmindedly plucking blades of fresh grass from the earth.

“Yes, my love?”

“I’d like it if we married one day. I’d like it very much.”

The Hatter had been in the middle of pouring a rather large glass of peach wine. Alice’s words jumbled his brain a great deal. So much so, in fact, that it did not communicate with his hand quickly enough, and the sweet liquid spilled over the goblet.

After coming to know Alice, the Hatter had never imagined a life without her. Never wanted one. He’d become accustomed to her presence and enjoyed it so that he found himself longing, aching, when she was absent. He’d seen himself with her as the man he was in current time, and the man he would be in all other timelines he might happen across. But the problem with being a man stuck in time is that thinking in finites makes infinity drag on forever. And marriage seemed the most finite of all.

His silence worried Alice, making her question his heart.

“Don’t you love me, Hat? Don’t you love me with all that you are, the way I do you?”

The Hatter felt immediate guilt for his quiet reaction, but he had spent so much of his life speaking before thinking and really, truly, having no idea what he was talking about. He didn’t want that reckless dithering in the words he shared with Alice.

When he did finally speak, his words were gentle. He picked up Alice’s hand as one does an antique ceramic figure, delicate and priceless.

“My sweet Alice,” said the Hatter. “You are my greatest joy, my only love. Life before you was riddles with no answers. I’d known nothing of the heart’s senses before feeling the metronome of your name. Al-ice. Al-ice.” The Hatter demonstrated the thrumming on his chest with his fist.

“I know there is a but coming…” said Alice.

“But I am a man without time. We speak of what ifs, but what of the right nows? There is no cure for forever, not unless Time says so. And if Time were to take away the gift he has bestowed, the right nows and the what ifs would be nothings because the Queen would have my head.”

Alice considered this. “Oh darling, for a man of such wisdom, you are often but a fool. Without time, there are no what ifs. Right now is all there will ever be because you will only exist in your present state. People change, but you needn’t have such worries. You will always be who you are, right here, right now, in this field.”

“Yes, but you will change. And what if your heart changes, too?”

“There is no room in my story for an ending without you. Which leads me to something I need to share with you.”

The Hatter sat at attention, a soldier ready for his lieutenant to finish providing crucial instructions. He leaned forward, urging her on.

“About a year ago, I went to see Time. I asked him for a favor.”

“Alice! You didn’t!”

“Is it not something you want?”

“Of course it is. I’ve already said it is so. But it is not a decision I wanted you to make until you were of an age and time when you were ready. You’ve still got so much living to do.”

“I agree. Which is why I’ve asked Time to stop me only when I intersect at your freezing point. I figure that’ll be all the time I need.”

The Hatter chuckled. “Are you calling me old, my dear?”

Alice returned his laughter. “Timeless. The term I was looking for is timeless.”

“Then what was all this business about you growing older than your Hatter?”

“This place has taught me to never show my cards before the hand is dealt.”

The Hatter looked into young Alice’s eyes, and he knew they were the eyes of his wife. Suddenly, the cruelty of eternity seemed softer, exciting even. There was finally something to look forward to. He gazed at their surroundings, nothing out of place, not even them. They were a part of the scenery, something beautiful to be seen and talked about, even painted.

“And what would you do if we were trapped in this field? Just the two of us, forever?”

Alice pondered a moment.

“Well, I reckon I’d eat dandelions. I’d eat dandelions for the rest of my life.”

It began as all love stories do: our eyes met. Only it wasn’t some magical moment of catharsis where the world slows down and our heartbeats joined together as a single, matching beat and the music faded into that steady, synchronized rhythm and we were finally home after so much time swimming against the tide, trying desperately to reach the shore.

It was nothing like that.

You were there and I was there, and so was a friend we both knew. And so we shook hands the way strangers do when they are trying not to be strangers anymore, and we all got a table together at the bar. The conversation was nice and you were nice and I didn’t think much of it until I saw you again a few months later at a birthday party.

It all happened slowly after that.

There was no jolted, jumbled montage of our moments together as we grew closer, as we went from friends to lovers to whatever you’d call the thing that comes next, the highest point we could reach together. Love is not a succession of such moments. It is the tiny spaces in between the highlights that matter most. It is the times between sleeping and wakefulness; the breath before a plunge into the water. These are the things we never remember in our framed photographs and retold stories, but they are the patches of soil upon which all good things grow and bloom. We bloomed beautiful, a spring rose destined to last the winter.

We grew old together, and we still remembered to love each other, a thing so often forgotten with the passing of years and the weight of time’s burdens. But you and I, we loved each other the way the moon hangs in the sky even in daylight-- not always visible, but always there somewhere, hidden inside the blue.

Oh, how I wish this was the way our story went.

But Fate is not always kind to the hopeful, and even love cannot contend with the cold truth of an X-ray scan and an ugly black splotch at its center, spreading just fast enough to be one step ahead.

You never lost your hair the way it always seems to happen in the movies. There was barely time for that, anyway. Barely time for much of anything besides the tears and making the kind of plans we never wanted to and, of course, the completely inadequate ‘goodbye’ that never quite made its way past your lips. It rung so hollow in my chest I thought I’d follow you right down into the ground within the day. But I didn’t.

You are out of reach now, my little moon hiding up there in the sky. I think of you only between each blink, so it’s not as bad as it used to be. Time is cruel and where there was never enough of it with you, there is too much stretched out in front of me now, waiting to be gobbled up by a life I can’t imagine living without you beside me. Perhaps that is our cruelest gift: to know love only for as long as is allowed. To know yourself only by the way your reflection shifts in your lover’s pupils, and then, suddenly, to know nothing.

I think one day I will see you again, because to think anything else makes that blue sky blot black like the stain in your lungs that swallowed you up. I think one day I will be able to take a step forward, but today there is a wall stretched out before me, so vast and wide that there is no way around it. Today, even breathing is a tedious, heavy chore. But tomorrow, I will open my eyes and I will roll from beneath the covers of my empty bed, and I will try again.

Tomorrow, I may even catch sight of the moon, peeking out from a pale morning sky.

Fear. Fear courses through my veins every second I see them standing there. It burns. Oh, it burns like a volcano was exploding from my heart, reaching from the tips of my fingers to the tips of my toes. My body aches from the fear. Shivers course through my body as I think of the ways I could lose you. Cancer, accidents, suicide. Anything's possible in this world, even if it wouldn't be much of a world without you. My mind swirls into the darkness. My hands reach out, trying to find some way to stop spiraling.

And then everything stops once we meet eyes. The burning sensation turns to light as you place your hands in mine. The spinning sensation slows to a stop as you smile. The fear vanishes once you speak. The words of your adoration fall from your lips, stopping my breath. "I love you," you say, so oblivious of all the ways things could go wrong. So oblivious to how short life really is.

But for you, I can swallow my fear. I can deal with the future as it comes. Because as long as you stay by my side, I can face anything. As we hug, my heart slows. "Never leave me," I whisper into your chest.

"I never plan on it."

And all at once, the tension in my body releases, and all my worries flee my mind. Just having you in my arms will always be enough.

If you are able to read this right now, you have something to lose no matter what situation you are in. Life. That is the last thing we will lose while on Earth. Therefore, everything else we have on top of that can be lost. We can either live in fear, or cherish what we have in the moment.

Most often, we only really see what we had when it is gone. A lot of people say they took breathing for granted once they get a stuffy nose. I, personally, wish I cherished having 20/20 vision when I was younger. The simple things in life can really make a difference.

When it comes to people, it can be painful to go through loss. That might mean through death, a disagreement, or just growing apart. I thought for a bit that if I didn’t get close with anyone, it would be a lot harder for me to be betrayed or go through a loss. That sounds kind of lonely though.

We choose how we look at life. You can either see only negative from the experience of a friend that stabbed you in the back, or you can tell yourself that you learned from it and grew. You can decide to stay bitter about having poor eyesight, or you can be happy about the vision you have left.

Learning from experiences you have and figuring out how to think more positively could almost be looked upon as something you gained from the loss. It is all about your perspective.

Two for a dollar

One of a kind

We bought them together

Only cheap plastic

Worth more than gold

It ties me to you

To a moment

To a day

hen there was us

Just we

Holding hands

Together again

More than a candy store trinket

Precious metal

As it rolls around the basin

Panic begins

It nears the event horizon

The edge of the drain

A last minute snatch

Preserving my memories

More precious than this ring

Which is only a physical reminder

Of the love we share

My mood ring

Like us

Colorful and rare

He was the kind of love that pulls you apart from the inside.

Feral and ravaging.

Crashing and teeming.

Skin ripping from the pressure building.

He was my fingers dug into my palms to form crescent, blood moons.

He was my breath too heavy to catch.

My bones splintering from the weight of my blood rushing.

He was my eyes closed tight and my head tipped back and my chest full of melancholy and ache.

He was the kind of love that is breaking.

A war determined to eat me from my body.

Myself, torn in shreds.

He was my tongue wetting my lips and my skin warmed and aching.

The creep of longing that tumbled across my neck and back.

The bruises smarting against whispered touches.

He was the light that breaks through when you come out of the shadows.

He was the darkness that pulled me in deeper.

He was a frenetic up and down, drain circling, tantrum.

He was the angst that I craved.

He was words pouring out of me all at once.

And he was the throbbing in my hysteric heart.

The pulsing torment that’s deconstructed my being.

And the insomnia that continues to keep my eyes tired and my mouth starving.

My destroyed.

My raw.

My devoured.

My tormented.

My gritty.

My careening.

My burnt.

My blistered.

My wrecked.

My fiery.

My raging.

My tortured.

My drowned.

My lonely, deadly, can’t hold it together.

My never ending.

Ending.

Blowing up a balloon until its full

Then continuing to inflate it

And waiting for the moment

It bursts in my face

Or watching as someone

Tries to open a tin with a sharp knife

Knowing that any minute now

His hand will slip

Maybe it's like watching

An episode of Casualty

You scream out at the TV

How can they not know?

Or the moment you're stood

At a crossing and watch someone

Walk across, looking at their mobile

Unaware that a bus nearly hit them

Or the moment you just know, but can't explain how

That's it's going to happen

Sooner rather than later

And you're just waiting for the bad news

The dripping on his cheek woke him. It was not a great amount of water, just a steady drip, drip, drip, upon his cheek. John wiped the water from his face. Fully awake now, he wondered how he had managed to sleep through the clamor. He could not distinguish the sound of the wind from the sound of the waves. All noises rushed together.

John raised his head from the sack of wheat he had been using as a pillow. He felt dizzy, disoriented from the motion of the ship. He tried to stand, fighting the forces pulling him this way and that. Nothing was stationary. Everything in this world shifted about.

After several days at sea, John thought he had grown accustomed to the pitch and toss of the ship. This was more. This was something else. He must get on deck to see what was happening. He guessed from the sound of the wind or the waves it must be a sea storm.

John staggered across the hold, slamming his shoulder into a post here, dodging a sliding crate there. Like a drunken man, nothing was quite where he expected it to be. He seemed to make far less progress forward than he made to and fro, side to side.

He burst finally into the open anxious for a breath of fresh air. Instead, he faced a wind which took his breath away. He clung tightly to the hatch unable to discern if it was day or night, if the water pelting him was rain or ocean spray. Lightening flashed all around him, simultaneously. Thunder ripped the night.

He stumbled forward off balance, out of control. Grabbing ahold of the mast he looked up to see one ragged and tattered sail flying half loose above him. A trio of crewman still struggled to haul it in intent on completing their labor no matter how futile the task may be.

“Away from there, you fool!” John heard the captain’s voice ring out above the crush of the storm. “Do you wish to die? Get back below deck.”

John looked back to see the captain tying a rope about his waist. He stood beside the helmsman. Neither man looked frightened, rather they looked as men determined, concentrating all their effort on one single thing, survival.

John prepared himself to call back but before he could speak a wave crashed over the deck sending one sailor sliding or rather floating across the ship. He saved himself from a deadly fate by grabbing hold of the railing on the starboard side while the wave rushed over him returning to the sea. John needed no further admonition. He slowly, gingerly, moistly, made his way below.

It was unpleasant in the hold, stuffy and damp. Water appeared to be leaking in from the sides, spilling down from above, and coming up from beneath all at once, though the place was not flooding. Somehow the water flowed in and out in every direction.

The rocking of the ship was violent and churned John’s stomach. He curled up in an empty, dry corner where he could brace himself between the boards if he started to slip. As much as he had confidence in the ship’s strength and her captain’s ability, what he had seen on the deck had frightened him. The waves were growing taller than the ship, the wind vicious, the lightening, the thunder. The forces of nature were greater than all the powers of man. Could anyone endure such an onslaught?

John closed his eyes. He covered his head with his arms trying to mute the sounds of the furious sea. He could not bock out the motion of the ship. He could not cover up the sensation of unbridled tumbling through space.

John was a Christian man. He believed but he was not a praying sort of man. It was only when he could endure no longer, when he felt surely the ship would be dashed to pieces, did he whisper his plea to God. “Just get me through this, Lord. Let me survive this storm and I’ll do anything you ask of me. I’ll serve the poor. I’ll evangelize the heathen just let me live.”

He did not propose this deal lightly. It was not received lightly.

When the seas calmed and the sun broke through on the morrow, John was left with a different choice to make. He was a Christian but he had never been much of a praying man.