He sat, wrapped in the melancholy of lost love, lost lives, lost happiness, reflecting on years of emptiness in the midst of an overfilled life. He was closed in thought, lost in memory, with aching and sadness flowing in and out of every nerve.

She knocked on the door, only knowing she wanted in, but not knowing why, or even what reality was behind the door. Knocking alone filled some need, some desire to act on some new reality within herself. It was a step forward in life, another action along the line of time that was necessary to the spending of that time.

He opened the door onto a new phase of relating, while opening doors into himself, into their past together, into their future together, and a into universe they had no control over. The door opened into his life, and out of hers, offering an orifice in time through which their lives would squeeze. The door opened out of his life, and into hers, and they would both be choosing their perceptions from the four possibilities. Universal pathways merged, twisted, and separated about them as she stepped across the threshold of personal space, mixing her new intersections with his old crossroads.

She entered his domain, bringing hers inside where it began to grow and mingle again with old familiar comforts and feelings, angers and fears, loves and desolations, nights and moonscapes alone. She entered his life through a door that had never been opened before, into a land that had never existed before, in a time that could never be again. She stepped into her life, and into his life, and into their new reality.

They sat, together and apart, side by side on the couch with a thousand stories in its cushions, dusty with the dusky memories of years watched and wept over, joys remarked and wondered at, lives over and begun.

He wept over his frustration, anger, loneliness, pain, sorrow, and loss. Grief wracked his frame as he sobbed disconsolately in her tender embrace. A sad and gaping hole had opened in his hope, and he felt like his life was pouring out in a mighty rush, roaring like a monstrous flood down the canyons of the past to sweep him up, tear him from his footings, and dash him helplessly against the rock walls of time and space.

She comforted him, and was comforted by the acceptance of the comforting, rejoicing in the touch of the tender soul revealed in all its honest agony, and grieving with him over his present tragedy. The line between them stretched for years, and together they managed to wind it in, drawing him out of the past, back into the present. The grief diminished to sighs, and sank into the sands of self-contrition, leaving him tired, spent from the exorcism of anger, sadness, and pain.

They embraced each other, and in that closure of their arms, they opened their minds to receive the embrace of the future. She felt him, as he felt her; and each felt the other’s feeling of themselves. Denial faded into reality as they arrived at the possibilities, gazed in wonder at the road before them, around them, within them. The first step had always already been taken, the next was already in play, with the last step choreographed among the infinite stars in their constant motion.

They kissed, and that sudden fire flashed through them, burning clean the sadness, and searing the angry loneliness to silence, numbing even their aching hearts with its intensity, as it raged into an inferno. The present gripped them in its reality, and spun them together into a new fabric with a new pattern. They could both be forgiven, and, for the moment, forget what seemed to have been, at least long enough to consider what else it might have been instead. In that moment of forgiveness, that instant of infinite possibilities opened the door on the passion they had always known, would always know, had already always known.

They lay side by side after the passion moved them, pushing them together toward the center of their desires, revealing their true needs naked between them. Acceptance had driven them onward and inward as they tore at the barriers between them, opening a gaping rent in the fabric of time and space that had kept them apart. Their long silence was broken! The voice they had been denied proclaimed their love in echoes that wandered freely through the newly unlocked futures around them, rebounding joyously from ceiling to wall, tripping cautiously through the windowpanes, settling at last into the fibers of their souls, there to resonate forever.

They slept then, the sleep of lovers, wrapped in the embrace of their arms and the embrace of their lives, comforted by each other and the void they had just filled in each other. A new world rose up from that sleep, spread its wings and softly took flight; while they, still sleeping, marveled at what they had done, what they had become, what they had found, what they could feel, what they had lost, what they could dream of, and what they had just set free between them.