At the edge of forever, he sits apart from his one true love. She sits across the void at the beginning of time. I could have begun by saying once upon a time, but how do you tell a story about people who no longer exist inside of time? No, these two lovers, separated by the matrices of time and space – separate planes to them – discovered a terrible truth about themselves, their love, and the world they promised one another.
His name was Yulee. He was simple boy from a simpler time. His heart was pure and his ambitions humble. He saw the world in black and white and knew nothing of the color of love. That was, until, he met a girl. Her name was Penny. She was a simple girl from that same simple time. She also saw the world in black and white and knew nothing of love until she met him.
It was a day much like the days that preceded it, much as the days that followed were expected to be. The sun snuck from cloud to cloud over the grassy fields of a park. Yulee was collecting stones from a nearby creek. He was fascinated by the roundness of the pebbles he picked up, unaware of the journey they made tumbling towards the ocean as the waters flowed. Penny was picking leaves from trees, fascinated by their varied forms. Some had pointed edges, others round, still others were serrated – appearing round from a distance, but she noticed the points when she wandered closer.
Along the edge of the creek, by a deep furrow the rushing water had carved by the bank, Penny felt an uncontrollable passion in the want to possess a specimen of a tree whose leaves deceived her at a distance. The branches held them just out of reach. Like a child taunting another, the lowest branch stood above the water of the creek. Penny climbed along the trunk, up to the low limb jutting out. She slid her way along the branch above the creek. Her reach was too short as she leaned further and further to pull off a leaf. The dewy moss that found its home in the craggy nooks of the tree bark made her loose her grip and she slid around to the bottom of the branch. She dangled below the limb as her own hoped to hold. She was loosing her grasp with each second and began yelling for help – she did not know how too swim! Too far from the edge of the bank if she fell to make her way back to land, she screamed and screamed.
Yulee had his pockets full of tiny round pebbles. He waded through the shallow parts of the ravine, drawn to the different colors. There were light gray stones, some deeper gray than others, and white ones and black ones. He dipped into the stream and pulled out one that he hadn’t noticed before. It didn’t look like any of the other pebbles he had collected. This one had color. A deep red hue, in perfect roundness, with a vein of blue running the whole way through its center. He held it in his hand and examined it with a severe intensity. It almost made his mind hurt. The sounds of the world faded into the whirling thoughts storming inside his head. He was aware of something, he did not know what. Words failed to describe the wonder in that object he started to feel. And like a sudden gust of wind opening the shutters of a house by the prelude to a storm, a shrill screech broke his concentration and the world reappeared around him.
Penny’s desperate cries for help echoed off the trunks of the trees and hollowed out edges of the creek. Yulee put the red pebble in his pocket and moved towards where he heard the commotion. Around a bend, he came upon Penny, dangling from the limb, her feet dipping into the deep pool below her as her kicking flexed the branch. Yulee trudged along the bank, his feet growing heavy with mud, until he reached the tree. He stood at the base of the tree and looked at her with an awkward smirk. It was the same face he had whilst examining the red pebble.
Penny noticed him as the limb continued to bob with her legs bicycling in the air, a vain attempt to gain traction on something. She yelled at him “Stop smiling and help me!” He snapped out of his daze and told her to stop kicking and stay still. He climbed the trunk with his mud covered feet and weight laden pockets, and scooted along the branch to where she was. He pulled her up, back on the branch where she started. She hugged the dewy, moss covered bark, unable to let go.
He asked why she was up there, and she told him about the leaf. His arms were longer than hers. He decided to make up for the gawking by grabbing the leaf for her. He scooted along the branch some more until he was in reach of the leaf. The bough bent uneasy beneath him. Penny felt the pull of gravity on her body as the limb dipped towards him. She looked up to see his hand holding a green leaf with serrated edges.
“Here you go,” he said, and she took the gift with a sheepish grin.
Just as she was about to thank him, a thunderous crack tore the tree limb between them. It launched her back to the edge of the bank. She landed plum on her bottom, still holding the leaf. She saw his half of the branch floating in the pool, his arms thrashing above his sunken head. The mud and the stones lacking the buoyancy he needed to break back above the surface for air. Penny panicked. She did not know how to swim, was never taught. And now this stranger, who had risked his life for helping her, and getting her that coveted leaf, was not waving but drowning!
She left the leaf on the knoll by the base of the tree where she landed and jumped to where the broken branch floated. She held tight to it, pushing off the edge of the bank to where Yulee started to stop flailing. She saw bubbles as his arms dipped into the murky water, all the silt kicked up in his thrashing. She put the bulk of the branch at her navel, pinching the stick between her thighs and her chest, took a deep breath, and tipped towards where she last saw his limbs. It seemed like forever by the time she found the hem of his shirt, she pulled and pulled, climbed his clothes upside down, lifting his torso over her shoulder and onto the branch. The two rolled over together, back into the open air. She found a root stalk that she could pull on to bring them back to the bank.
Penny tossed Yulee onto the shore and crawled up next to him. She looked him over, saw he wasn’t breathing. She put her hands together on the center of his chest and pushed in pulses. When that didn’t work, she moved to his mouth and placed her lips on his to give him breaths he could not take. She moved back to pushing in pulses, then back to breathing for him. It seemed like forever. Yulee opened his eyes to see her face so close to his. He retched a moment, then coughed clear the lungs full of water. They lay beside one another exasperated. Their clothes soaked and soiled from rolling around on the sediment of the creek.
After a while, they rolled towards one another and introduced themselves. The talked for a spell about who they were and how much they had in common. Then there was an awkward silence between them, as if they had spoken every word in every order that words could be put in, and tried to avoid the eyes of the other. But each caught the other stealing glances and the spark of romance made their hearts flutter. It was there, on the edge of the bank that they fell in love – a true love. So true it need not be explained, cannot be explained, as there are truths in proofs of life and logic that must be accepted upon faith. Otherwise, everything falls apart.
Yulee searched his pockets for the special rock he had found before he met Penny. He worried he had lost it in the water, but found it easy enough among the plain round rocks of grays and whites, colors so uninspiring where once they were fascinating. He showed Penny, dropped the pebble into her open hand. She admired its perfect roundness, the sapphire blue line that split its two spheres. The night was coming upon where they sat. They noticed that the blue vein still maintained its radiance even in the faltering sunlight. Penny noticed it first and held up the sphere with her hand to show Yulee. He held the other hemisphere as she did hers – thumbs pointed down, their other digits cresting in a mirror image. The held the stone with their hands making the symbol of a heart. They looked to each other as their fingers touched tips and kissed each others lips in the iridescent shimmer.
As they kissed, the stone split in two along the line of blue at its center. Each half sunk into the skin of both their hands without them noticing while they interlaced their fingers in passionate embrace. They became unstuck in time, unlimited by the structure of the universe, removed from the substantive matrix the way one leaves a pool.
At first, they were confused. They appeared to exist within a blue sphere, the walls of which distorted an exterior of the park. But the images they saw were of many places at many times, too complex to describe with words in any accurate way. They walked away from the center to edge of the sphere and fell through. They were still in the park, but years in the past. It took a long time to master the ability, to even realize the trigger. That first trip was testing. They were on the edge of violence before they rationalized that they knew that this was some sort of gift, something bestowed upon true love – an eternity to be together at any point in the continuum.
They were set adrift through time. Their wanderings, haphazard at first, spanned the entirety of existence. They mastered the traveling like sailors master the seas. They lost each other in the first days, falling into different times in the same space, or in different places during the same Time. They learned it had to do with the pebble that Yulee had found. Whenever they held hands and kissed, they opened the door. In those times they were separated, they could make the trek back to each other. They could even travel on their own. An effort in and of itself, it involved true feelings of longing for their missing half, letting the tears of solitude mix with a kiss to the palm.
They lived lifetimes outside of time. They didn’t seem to age, no matter how many years they spent apart wonder where the other could be – that was before they discovered their independent abilities. After those fretful early years, as they were still aware of time’s passage in that relative way, they settled in a space they found no one would ever discover. A place on earth inaccessible and undesirable for exploration. They made trips into those points of time and space during civilization that they had found romantic or worth revisiting – like when they found the best years for wine. They began to read volumes at time, having so much of it to themselves. They read of their own exploits recorded for the ages.
You see, Yulee and Penny were the lovers in ever story ever written – all the good ones anyway. They were Adam and Eve, born of clay and bone, their original sin was to be human. They were Dante and Beatrice, Ulysses and Penelope, lost from each other for a time, toiling through the depths of darkness to find each other, having night extended into forever together. They had crossed through time, told their stories to the poets of the ages during those early excursion where they managed to be separated. They liked that everyone else who believed in romance had been informed by their relentless searches for one another. Their love recorded in the whole of the literary canon of their origin time. They built a library for themselves in that special space with those books, laughing at the inaccuracies, the petty jealousies of the writer, the meanings lost in translation.
They had a child at one point. It was a boy. They named him Tillie. They had him in the early times when they often lost one another in history, leaving clues for one another in time – monuments of stone made over the course of millennia mapping out the stars. Tillie seemed to age while they did not. This fact frightened Tillie as he grew older. They saw the constant consternation in his eyes and could not bear the weight of outliving their own child, watching him die, so they decided to disappear back into the slipstream of time.
It was after they left Tillie they managed to see both ends of time’s line.
They ventured together to the time and place where all things were one. They were unaffected by the physical properties that existed, as they were extracted from that which they were once a part of. Now, apart from it, they could step out into any part of the matrices of space-time and observe it as a god might. Penny found it magnificent. A single point of limitless possibilities and potential, the entirety of history packaged into a point invisible to the eye at the inception point. She wanted to spend a time in that instant so much she spent eons learning how to maintain a moment.
Yulee was the opposite. He enjoyed the end times. The gaping void consuming the universe, the skin of space-time spread so thin nothing could coalesce into matter, create gravity. He didn’t need to learn the art of maintaining a moment as Penny did. Forever went on forever like that. Even if they pushed to the farthest limit of the timeline, they’d only reach the edge of the universe on its constant march towards the infinite. It kept expanding, pulling the fabric of space-time tauter and tauter. He wanted to wait for the snap. The Big Collapse!
After these excursions, they returned to that space they had found away from the rest of the world. They often slept lengths of seasons. No one was around to disturb them. This part of history was a place humans no longer occupied. They never looked into why, they accepted the absence of others. There were no structures that survived the ebb and tide. No monuments save the nubbie burms of the ones they had built so long ago. No one and nothing to bother them. They figured it was a meteor, like the one they saw take the dinosaurs. No great beasts to overrun the world at this point though.
It was during one of those long winter naps they heard a knock on the door of the cabin they had built in the middle of nowhen. They weren’t sure if they had returned to the epoch of homo absentia or a little early. Penny stood behind Yulee, peering over his shoulder as he opened the door. A cold wind brushed past her skin giving her shivers. Her eyes focused in the dark on the hooded figure standing in the doorway in front of Yulee. It pulled its hood down to reveal the weary, weathered face of an ancient man, emaciated and arthritic. They bid him welcome and made a pleasant space for him. His voice was horse and his limbs looked brittle. They built a fire and poured him some hot tea.
It took a while – almost long enough to want to jump forward to it – but the man’s voice finally came back and he began to speak.
The man described a time they had almost forgotten. He told a tale of a frightened child and remorseful parents. He talked of abandonment and sojourn. He spoke of endless death. It took them more time to admit it to themselves than it did for them to realize that the ancient stranger sitting across from them was no one other than their child, Tillie. They became teary eyed and kneeled by the boy, now an old, old man. They cried into his tattered clothes. Tillie was unmoved. He was devoid of emotion, having been alone for so long, he lost the instinct to emote. His heart was not stone, but it did not know how to warm the bones that had spent in the cold. He continued to tell them his story.
“They discovered who you were – what you were – and realized no others could possess your powers,” he explained in a prosaic cadence. “It’s not the stones, it’s the love. You two are the only ones to ever find true love. Selfless love. It pulls you outside of time. The only reason I have lived this long is because of my love for you both. I was once afraid, unsure as to why the two of you never aged. I went to the Academy, studied the histories, discovered that every story of love was your story of love.”
He went on to describe what happened over the course of eternity. He wandered the earth looking for his parents. Saw the world that once believed in institutions of marriage suffer absolute divorce rates. Saw a lack of affinity between human beings. Saw that apathy give way to violence and mass slaughter. He survived the Forever War. Watched the last person born into a natural life spend his life burying all those that lived before and gave up on the possibility of love. Always only just so close in being able to reunite. His love was true, but it wavered for a time, and that is why he had grown old. He could not be as selfless with his affections as they were to each other. Others discovered the truth – that there was no true love, no acts of selfless caring, there was only the two of them bouncing around through history, untraceable and untouchable by the corruption that the rest of the world faced.
Penny was upset. She had an anger boiling from within. There was a sense of justice absent from the universe that she could not tolerate. She felt as if they had taken balance and fairness with them – their selfless love for one another was a selfish love of each other. Tillie looked at his parents, his eyes shaking out a tear from each corner. He was so happy to see them again, to see their faces unchanged even after so long apart. Penny leaned over and gave him a hug and kiss as a mother does to her child, running her fingers over his face. She leaned away and looked into the eyes and saw that life had left him. She wailed for decades. Yulee held her hand just as long.
After her grief subsided, she turned to Yulee and told him that they could no longer be with one another, no longer share the forever they had found. If others could not share in the joys of love as they had, they had no right to enjoy it themselves. He did not agree with her, but accepted it was her belief and made the sacrifice, resigning himself to spend the rest of eternity at the edge of forever, never to see her, never to touch her, never to love her again.
And in the end is where he stays, looking across the gaping void towards the center of the universe where he knows his only true love watches that single point of limitless possibilities and potential. The beginning of everything.
