Falling (8.1): Decision. That Kiss. Magnificent. Real.

A Single Thread of Light

1. The Decision

Ruby woke with her lips still warm, the ghost of a kiss lingering like a physical presence. Morning light slanted through her borrowed apartment's windows in Milan, transforming the modest room into something almost ethereal. She touched her fingertips to her mouth, surprised to find it slightly swollen, as if the kiss that had visited her dreams—or was it something more?—had left its mark on her waking flesh.

"Impossible," she whispered to the empty room, but even as she said it, she knew impossibility had become a poor measure of her reality.

Ruby rose and moved to the narrow balcony overlooking the Milanese street below. The city continued its morning choreography, oblivious to her inner turmoil—vendors arranging produce with mathematical precision, students rushing with bookbags slung across shoulders, businesspeople navigating the currents of pedestrians with practiced indifference. She existed both within this flow and separate from it, a curious state of her own making.

Last night's dream lingered with unusual persistence. Lester had been there, not as memory or imagination, but with a presence so tangible she could still feel the precise pressure of his mouth against hers, still taste the particular flavor that belonged only to him. Distance had seemed meaningless, time had curved around them, and for a brief moment, they had existed in perfect synchronicity.

In the Library of Lost Moments, the Librarian and her apprentice watched as Ruby's patterns shifted in the eternal twilight.

"Look," the Librarian said, her form momentarily becoming translucent as she gestured toward the floating mathematics. "Her connection with Lester is creating new forms."

Maya studied the equations with newfound understanding. "The kiss changed something fundamental. Their sensual constants are synchronizing across distance."

"Yes," the Librarian agreed, her voice carrying echoes of all the lovers throughout history who had defied separation. "Their bodies are still solving for each other, even as their minds follow different paths."

Above them, Ruby's transformative geometry pulsed with new certainty, lines of blue light—unmistakably the shade of Lester's steady geometry—weaving through her previously hollow patterns.

"But will she recognize what's happening?" Maya asked, watching as Ruby's fingers absently traced patterns on the balcony railing that perfectly mirrored the equations forming in the Library.

The Librarian smiled. "That's what we're about to find out."

Ruby's phone chimed with an email notification. Jonathan, with timing that seemed too perfect to be coincidence. She had written to him yesterday, a rambling, confused message about feeling simultaneously tethered and untethered, about the recurring dreams of Lester that seemed more real than her waking life in Milan.

His response glowed on her screen:

Rubes,

What you're describing isn't just longing or regret or even memory. There's a physics to emotional connection that our family has spent generations denying. Remember that physics concept I mentioned? About particles that remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, regardless of distance or time?

I'm not telling you what to do. I'm suggesting that some connections exist outside our usual understanding of reality. Our family never gave us language for this, but that doesn't make it less real.

If you need to go, just go, even just to understand, I've transferred enough for a one-way ticket to my PayPal. Use it or don't—your choice. But don't let our family's fear of depth become yours.

- J

Ruby stared at the message, something shifting in her with the certainty of tectonic plates realigning. She glanced at her reflection in the window, noticing how the morning light caught her hair with unusual brilliance, turning the fiery strands into something that reminded her of the strange luminous threads of light she had glimpsed in her dream.

A decision crystallized within her, not formed through careful deliberation but arising with an inevitability she couldn't resist. She didn't need to think about it, didn't need to weigh options or consider consequences. The answer had already formed itself.

Her fingers moved across her phone with trembling precision, booking a flight to Melbourne that would leave that evening. The familiar voice of family caution attempted to assert itself—reminding her of failure, of vulnerability, of the comfort found in never diving too deep—but for once, it seemed distant, its influence diluted by something stronger.

Ruby packed chaotically, as usual, her movements guided by a certainty she couldn't articulate or deny. Each item she placed in her suitcase felt like another piece in a puzzle that was inevitably drawing her back toward Lester, toward the only person who had ever loved her with a steadiness strong enough to challenge her family's constant motion.

"She's breaking the patterns," Maya observed, watching as Ruby's decisions created ripples through the hollow mathematics that had defined her family for generations. "Look how her equations are reshaping themselves."

In the Library, Ruby's book pulsed with new light, its pages forming theorems that contradicted everything the hollow archives had taught for centuries. The Librarian nodded with satisfaction, her form momentarily aligning with the exact angle of sunlight that fell across Ruby's suitcase in Milan.

"The true connection is creating its own kind of gravity," she explained, showing Maya how these patterns pulled at each other across the Library's infinite geometry. "It bends the space around it, creating curvatures that allow parallel lines to eventually intersect."

As Ruby closed her suitcase, somewhere in Melbourne, Lester paused in the middle of wrapping a wine glass in newspaper, overtaken by a physical certainty he couldn't or question.

He felt something approaching, like a change in barometric pressure before a storm, like the peculiar stillness that precedes something momentous.

The Librarian smiled, her form becoming like the space between heartbeats, between breaths, between lovers who understand that separation is sometimes just another form of connection.

"And now," she said to Maya, her voice carrying the weight of all stories ever written and yet to be written, "watch carefully. This is how parallel lines find their impossible intersection."

2. The Journey

Thirty-seven thousand feet above the earth, Ruby pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the airplane window. Beneath her, clouds formed patterns that reminded her of the circles her family had drawn around themselves for generations—perfect geometries of exclusion and emptiness. But now, as she moved through them, they seemed permeable, their boundaries less definite than she'd once believed.

She closed her eyes, feeling the aircraft carrying her back to Lester, as if following some invisible thread that connected them across distance. The sensation wasn't unfamiliar; she had been running all her life, after all. The difference was that this time, she was running toward rather than away.

Come with me and be my love, she thought, recalling words from one of Lester's poems that had always seemed like an invitation rather than a demand. Take apart my heart. Nibble my spirit. Weave your scent into my life.

The familiar caution whispered in her mind, calculating all the ways this journey could end in disaster. Three hundred and eighty-six cousins had perfected the art of emotional avoidance, and their collective wisdom had been her inheritance—a geometry of distance, a calculus of shallow connection.

"Look at the effort they're exerting," the Librarian observed, her form shifting like smoke as she pointed to disturbances in the Hollow Archives. "The family pattern is fighting her decision with everything it has."

Maya nodded, watching as dark volumes in the shadows pulsed with increased intensity, their hollow mathematics creating counter-arguments against Ruby's return. "They're sending more messages," she noted, seeing Ruby's phone light up with notifications from cousins she hadn't spoken to in years, each one carrying precisely calibrated warnings wrapped in false concern.

"Of course," the Librarian said. "The hollow mathematics cannot survive authentic connection—it's an existential threat to their entire existence."

In the Library's eternal twilight, Ruby's book continued to transform, its pages now incorporating elements from Lester's steady blue patterns. With each mile the airplane traveled, the influence of the hollow archives diminished slightly, their shadows receding as the distance between Ruby and her family's epicenter increased. Except he was moving toward them as well as toward him.

"Watch how her patterns change as she moves physically away from their influence," the Librarian instructed, showing Maya how Ruby's geometries were evolving with each passing hour. "Distance is creating space for new results to form."

Ruby scrolled through the messages, noting with detached curiosity how they all struck the same notes: caution disguised as care, fear masked as wisdom, the subtle suggestion that depth was dangerous, that permanence was impossible, that running was not just acceptable but necessary.

She remembered Lester's words from long ago: "Your family treats love like a contagion—something to be contained, controlled, and ultimately escaped from."

She had been offended then, perceiving his observation as judgment. Now, seeing the coordinated effort to pull her back into the family's orbit of perpetual negative motion, she recognized the truth in his assessment. They weren't evil or even intentionally manipulative—they simply couldn't comprehend experiences that contradicted their own. To them, Lester's steady presence was as incomprehensible as quantum physics to ancient astronomers.

A memory surfaced—her father, Dan, his anger following predictable sequences of escalation; her mother, Lois, prayers forming circular barriers against genuine feeling. Her brother Mark, the chaotic patterns of petty theft and minor betrayals. All of them teaching her, through their different approaches, the same fundamental lesson: authentic connection was either impossible or dangerous.

The plane hit turbulence, and Ruby gripped the armrests, feeling the physical manifestation of the inner storms she was navigating. For a startling moment, the cabin lights flickered, and in that brief darkness, she thought she saw thin threads of blue light emanating from her own skin—the same strange luminescence that had appeared in her dream, connecting her to Lester across distance.

When the lights steadied, the threads were gone, but the sensation lingered—the certainty that she was tethered to something, to someone, by forces that transcended understanding.

"Did you see that?" Maya asked, her apprentice mark glowing with increased intensity. "The connection manifested visibly, even in her physical reality."

The Librarian nodded, her form momentarily aligning with the exact frequency of the aircraft's vibrations. "The physical world occasionally acknowledges what the metaphysical has already proven. Look—" She pointed to where Ruby's patterns and Lester's had briefly synchronized perfectly, creating a resonance that rippled through all the surrounding mathematics.

"They're experiencing each other's presence across vast distance," the Librarian explained. "These momentary alignments are becoming more frequent as the physical distance between them decreases."

In the shadowed recesses of the Hollow Archives, books began to shift uneasily on their shelves, their dark bindings unable to fully absorb the faint blue light that had begun to seep between volumes. The 386 cousins' collective ‘intelligence’ was encountering a variable it couldn't accommodate—the kind of connection that refused to be shallow, that persisted despite distance and time.

"The family legacy is weakening," Maya observed. "With each mile she travels, their influence diminishes."

"Yes," the Librarian agreed, "but don't underestimate its power. Generations of practiced emptiness have created their own gravity. The hollow has ways of reclaiming those who try to become whole."

The in-flight screen showed their position over the Pacific Ocean, still hours from Australia. Ruby finally allowed herself to sleep, surrendering to the exhaustion that came from fighting not just jet lag but the accumulated weight of her family's expectations.

As consciousness faded, she felt herself falling again—not with the terror of groundlessness but with the exhilaration of flight. In this liminal space between waking and dreaming, she thought she heard Lester's voice, clear as if he were seated beside her: Keep me in your pocket. Let me roll in the dryer, cleansed. Until I am spent, near death. Take me out. Roll me around your fingers like a poker chip. Cash me in and then win.

Words from his poem, words she had never fully understood until now—an invitation to bring him completely into her life, to incorporate him into her world in ways her family had never allowed. They had no language for this kind of intimacy, this kind of merger.

Ruby slept deeply, and in her dreams, she was neither running nor falling but flying—moving purposefully through skies that carried her toward rather than away. Below her, the familiar patterns of her family's circles grew smaller, dimmer, their perfect geometries of exclusion receding with each mile. Still, she was also moving toward them in New Zealand.

Above her, the stars formed new constellations, new patterns—configurations that incorporated both Lester's steady constants and her own transformative variables. In this dream-space where emotion operated without constraints, she felt something that she couldn't name but recognized—the precise feeling of bodies that remember each other across distance.

When she woke as the plane began its descent toward Melbourne, Ruby carried the residue of this dream-knowledge with her. Something fundamental had shifted during the journey—not just her physical location but her internal landscape. The familiar caution still whispered its warnings, but now there were other currents at work, other forces being proven.

As the city's lights came into view below, Ruby felt a sudden certainty wash over her. Lester was there, somewhere in the illumination, and his body was sensing her approach with the same precision that hers was detecting his presence. The connection between them was not just metaphor but reality—operating according to laws her family had spent generations denying.

"Almost there," she whispered to herself, or perhaps to him, knowing somehow that across the miles that still separated them, he would feel the words even if he couldn't hear them.

The plane banked toward the runway, and for a brief, moment, Ruby thought she saw threads of blue light extending from the aircraft, reaching toward the city like threads of light, tendrils searching for their other half. Then the wheels touched down, and reality snapped back into focus—but the certainty remained.

She had arrived, and whatever came next would not be dictated by the patterns of her past but by the new forces she and Lester were generating together, even before they reunited.

3. Anticipation

Lester woke at precisely 3:17 AM, his body alert with a certainty that had no conscious thought. Something had changed in the world around him—a shift so fundamental that it had pulled him from deep sleep with the urgency of sirens.

He sat up in bed, his skin humming with an energy he couldn't name. The darkness around him seemed unusually alive, as if the air itself were charged with possibility. For weeks, he had been methodically wrapping memories in newspaper—glasses, books, photographs—preparing to move from the house that still carried Ruby's absence like a physical presence. Tonight, however, the careful resignation that had guided his packing gave way to something else—an anticipation so pure it was almost painful.

"She's coming," he whispered to the empty room, the words emerging not as a question or a hope but as a bone-deep certainty—like knowing that gravity exists or that the sun will rise in the east.

How he knew, he couldn't explain. The knowledge wasn't in his mind but in his body—in the way his heartbeat had synchronized with a distant rhythm, in the way his skin remembered the pressure of her touch. Trust and love, he had once written in a poem she'd barely acknowledged, were not separate entities but aspects of the same fundamental force. Trust, because with love comes the idea of possibility.

The words returned to him now, carrying new meaning. He had trusted when there was no logical reason to, loved when it defied every rational calculation. And somehow, in ways that transcended conventional understanding, that trust had become its own kind of gravity, bending the space between them until separation became merely another variable to solve rather than an absolute.

In the Library, the Librarian and Maya observed as Lester's blue threads pulsed with increased intensity, its steady mathematics creating ripples that extended far beyond his individual patterns.

"His constants are becoming more defined," Maya noted, watching as Lester moved through his bedroom with newfound purpose, abandoning the newspaper and boxes to stand at the window, looking out at the pre-dawn city as if expecting to see something appear on the horizon.

"Yes," the Librarian agreed. "His certainty is establishing new variables in their shared equation. Look—" She pointed to where Lester's steady blue patterns were sending out waves that perfectly matched the frequency of Ruby's approaching presence, though neither of them consciously knew the precise calibration.

"They're solving for each other across distance," Maya realized, watching as these patterns created moment-specific harmonics, temporary alignments that suggested imminent convergence.

The Librarian nodded, her form briefly taking on aspects of every lover throughout history who had sensed a beloved's approach before any physical indication. "The body operates according to principles that conventional physics is only beginning to understand," she explained. "What scientists call entanglement is just one approximation of what's really happening between them."

She gestured to a book on her desk—different from the mirror-bound volume she usually consulted. This one pulsed with a blue light identical to Lester's patterns, its pages filled with equations about trust and possibility, about the gravity love creates when it refuses to accept the impossibility of connection.

"Trust or Love?" Maya read from the book's cover, recognizing it as one of Lester's poems.

"He's learning that they're the same thing," the Librarian explained, her voice carrying echoes of all who had ever sought to quantify the unquantifiable. "Trust is the foundation that allows love to operate across distances. It's the principle that's guiding his certainty now."

Lester showered and dressed, though the lights of dawn were still hours away and he had nowhere to go. His movements were purposeful, guided by an internal logic that made perfect sense to his body even as his mind struggled to articulate what was happening. He moved through the house turning on lights, opening windows, as if preparing for an arrival his conscious self hadn't been informed about.

In the kitchen, he found himself making coffee for two, the familiar ritual carrying an unfamiliar significance. He measured grounds with precise care (wishful, this was a cheap pod machine), his hands remembering the exact proportions Ruby had preferred—stronger than his own, with just milky foam that most wouldn't notice but that she insisted made all the difference.

The scent filled the kitchen, and Lester was suddenly overtaken by a memory so vivid it was almost hallucination—Ruby on their first morning together, wearing in of his t-shirts, her hair a flame against the luxuriously soft fabric, reaching for the mug he'd offered with a smile that suggested she'd discovered something unexpected about him, about herself, about the possibilities that existed in the space between them.

The memory should have hurt—it had hurt, for months after she left, making coffee a minefield of remembrance. But now it carried a different quality, not the ache of something lost but the anticipation of something returning. The distinction was subtle but profound, like the difference between falling and flying.

His phone chimed with an incoming message, and Lester knew before looking who it would be from. Jonathan—Ruby's cousin in New York, the one who had begun questioning the family's patterns, the one who occasionally reached out with cryptic messages that seemed designed to bridge worlds rather than define them.

Lester—

The way you love isn't the kind that fades with absence. I never understood this until recently, watching the patterns that connect people across distances. Trust me when I say that some connections operate outside conventional understanding—they exist whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we run from them or toward them.

She's on her way back. I don't know what will happen, but I know the feeling of certainty when I see it. Your presence, as she describes it, has been a constant in a situation that should have had no stability.

- J

Lester stared at the message, surprised not by its arrival and its content but by his lack of surprise. Of course she was coming back. Of course Jonathan knew. Of course there was a reason for this certainty, a physics to the connection that had persisted despite every rational reason for it to dissolve.

He scrolled through his phone to the poem he'd written months ago, the one about trust and love being aspects of the same force, the one that had emerged fully formed in the middle of the night as if dictated by some outside source:

Trust.Because with love comes the idea of possibility. When possibility emerges, you trust that what was once not there is available. So, trust because if you have trust you already have love. The idea sticks when the feeling fades, when the memories become shades of grey. Love can be tested. You know love when you feel like you have done something very basic, that you cannot do without the one you love. It is like learning to walk and unless al eg is severed or damaged, you cannot unlearn to walk.Real love is learning to walk together.

The words felt different now, as if they'd been waiting for this moment to reveal their true meaning. Trust wasn't the absence of doubt but the presence of possibility—the certainty that some connections transcend conventional understanding of proximity and distance, of presence and absence.

Lester moved to the living room, where boxes stood half-packed, their contents wrapped in newspaper that crinkled with movement. Among them was a small jewelry box containing the five crystal pendants that spelled "TRUST" and the “R” he has tried to mend with jewlers tools—the ones he'd carried in his pocket when he'd asked Ruby, years ago, whether she valued trust or love more. She had said "trust," and he had given her the pendants, a token of something they were both still learning to understand.

She had left them behind when she went, a rejection that had hurt more than it should. Now, Lester retrieved the box, holding the crystals in his palm where they caught the light from the desk lamp, sending prisms dancing across the walls. Each one had a different refractive property, creating patterns that overlapped and combined in ways that seemed random but actually followed precise laws of physics.

"Look at the refraction patterns," the Librarian instructed Maya, pointing to where the crystal-cast lights created equations in the air of Lester's living room—equations that perfectly matched the mathematical harmonics being generated between his steady blue constants and Ruby's approaching variations.

"They're solving the same theorems," Maya realized, watching as these light patterns briefly aligned with the formulas floating in the Library's eternal twilight. "The physical world is calculating what we're observing here."

The Librarian nodded, her form momentarily aligning with the exact angle of light passing through the crystals. "The pendants were already a bridge," she explained. "He chose them because each one refracts light differently, creating patterns that can only align under very specific conditions. But, also he’d chosen TRUST"

"Like quantum states that can only synchronize at precise moments," Maya observed.

"Exactly," the Librarian agreed. "He didn't consciously know the mathematics he was employing, but his emotional intuition guided him to the perfect constants." She gestured to where the crystal-cast lights briefly formed a pattern identical to the threads connecting Lester and Ruby across distance. "The symbols we choose often have intelligence beyond our understanding."

Lester placed the crystals carefully in his pocket, locked together on a key chain, the weight familiar and reassuring. Outside, the first hints of light were appearing, the darkness giving way to a gradient of blues and purples that seemed to pulse with their own internal rhythm. He moved to the window again, looking out at the quiet street.

A certainty continued to grow within him—not a hope or a wish, but a knowledge as fundamental as his own heartbeat. Ruby was coming to see him. Not as a mirage or a memory but as a physical presence, as real and substantial as the ground beneath his feet. Whether their story would continue, whether the reconnection would last, he couldn't know—but the return itself was an inevitability, a truth already proven in ways he felt but couldn't fully articulate.

He picked up his keys, his wallet (took him a great while to find them), the essential things that defined movement through the world. Then, without conscious decision, he got in his car and began driving toward the airport, guided by a certainty that mindful understanding. His body was moving with perfect precision, nerve endings and skin cells and heartbeats responding to signals his mind hadn't processed.

As he drove through the awakening city, Lester felt something stronger growing within him—a constant that had refused to diminish despite months of separation, a presence that persisted across impossible distance. Jonathan's words echoed in his mind: Your presence has been a constant in a situation that should have had no stability.

Somewhere over Australia, a plane was descending, carrying Ruby back to the city they had once shared. Lester didn't know which flight, didn't know when it would land, but he knew with absolute certainty that she was approaching. His body had already calculated her trajectory, was already solving for the precise point of intersection.

The connection between them continued its perfection, creating truths about reunion that moved beyond the usual variables of forgiveness or reconciliation. Their bodies were navigating toward each other like celestial objects drawn by gravity, following formulas written in nerve endings and heartbeats rather than in numbers and symbols.

As the city fully awakened around him, Lester felt something he hadn't experienced in months—the certainty that came not from hope or desperation but from inspired trust in the connection that operated beyond understanding. Somewhere in the morning sky above Melbourne, Ruby was approaching, and whatever came next would not be dictated by the past but by the new forces they were generating together, even before they reunited.

Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters

Falling(8) PART 2: Together [LINK]