Amor fati. Love of fate. A Latin thing but most know it as a Nietzsche thing.
Everything that happens within a lifespan is necessary for existence—the ugly and the uglier. To love fate is to accept these events, no matter how horrific. To know the future and to embrace it is to love fate. Some days, I believe I saw your face approaching and I saw mine.
And if I were given the chance to relive my whole life in a constant loop, I'd say "yes," the way you did at Rendezvous. I'd live it a thousand times over.
My mother once told me: Do not wage a crusade with your suffering.
I wouldn't change a thing. Not you, not me. I have loved life before you, and I have known agony before I knew you.
* * *
You came to visit the latter half of 2016.
My guess is that you heard things—whispers, murmurs, and suggestions in the backdrop. My guess is that you heard that I never left, that I couldn't bear to leave.
You showed up at my door because I still lived in the same place. You, at one point, lived there too. I was making dinner with cabernet, a cream robe slipping down one shoulder. The doorbell rang and I think for a few seconds, I knew it was you. I couldn't explain it other than the fact that my heart knew.
Do you know how?
Do you know—remember—that moment back in our lives when I had just met you and you were aware of who I was? The overlapping of our lives? And how every moment after that when we saw each other, our blood pumped with twice a ferocity?
It drifted back to me. As I was a few feet from the door, that feeling drifted back to my chest, like a songbird's coming home.
I missed the thrumming of my heart whenever you were near, I missed the anticipation, the excitement. For a while there, back in 2015, I was certain my chest would never beat the same way again (not in happiness, not in fear, and not in sex). Yet as I unlocked the door to see you there, hair drenched and in your suit (a perfect dimple on your tie), I felt the familiar crosshatching of my arteries.
He was perched on my hip, having grown silent at your presence.
I could see it then, like I saw it a hundred times before. They formed in your eyes—still lovely, always lovely—and streaked down your cheeks. They perched awhile at your chin before giving away.
A hesitation is a feeling eternal.
"Is he...? Can I?"
"Yes."
The war was over. The war was over; the angels resided still in their spheres.
