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In the space between dimensions, where reality is bent like light through a crystal hidden under a pillow, the Library of Lost Moments materialized in the heart of Melbourne. It was a building that existed simultaneously in every reality where love had ever failed and succeeded. Its shelves stretched infinitely upward, each book containing a love story that could have been, might have been, or never was. The air shimmered with possibilities, thick with the weight of quantum probability. Here, among the ethereal stacks, the Librarian of Lost Loves watched as four souls navigated the delicate threads of their destinies. She was neither young nor old, her form shifting like pages in the wind, her eyes holding the wisdom of every romance ever written and unwritten. Time, she knew, curved around the gravity of significant moments, creating loops of possibility. The Librarian's apprentice, Maya, traced her fingers along the spines of leather-bound books that had never been written. Her silver hair caught the light that shouldn't exist in this windowless room, creating halos that danced across the ancient wooden shelves. Above her, stairs spiraled impossibly upward, defying architecture and gravity with equal disdain. "You're thinking too loudly again," the Librarian said without looking up from her desk. She sat in a pool of amber lamplight, her ageless face illuminated by the glow of a book that wrote itself beneath her watching eyes. Her quill never moved, yet words appeared on the page in elegant script, recording the present moment as it unfolded across multiple realities. Maya paused at a shelf marked "Melbourne, 2025" and pulled out a volume bound in midnight blue. "Lester's story is bleeding through the pages again," she said, holding up the book to show ink seeping from between its closed pages. "And look—" She opened it carefully, revealing words that seemed to swim across the paper like fish in dark water. "He's still writing to her every day, even though he knows she won't answer." The Librarian finally looked up, her eyes shifting color like opals catching light. "Some loves refuse to be archived properly," she said, rising from her desk with fluid grace. "They leak and stain and refuse to dry." She took the book from Maya's hands and ran her palm over the weeping pages. The ink retreated slightly at her touch, but didn't fully settle. "Should we intervene?" Maya asked, her apprentice mark—a small silver key inked at the corner of her left eye—gleaming in the strange light. "We already are," the Librarian smiled, though the expression held secrets Maya couldn't yet read. "Watch." The scene shifted, reality folding like origami around them until they stood unseen in a Melbourne restaurant. Lester sat alone at his usual table, his phone face-down beside his untouched wine glass. The Librarian moved behind him, her form barely visible even to Maya's trained eye, and whispered something in a language older than time. Lester's phone buzzed. "What did you do?" Maya whispered. "Reminded him that some stories need to end before others can begin." The Librarian's form flickered like candlelight. "Now, show me what you've learned. There's another heart that needs tending." Maya concentrated, feeling the weight of the Library's knowledge press against her consciousness. The restaurant dissolved, replaced by a small café in Milan. Ruby sat stirring her coffee, her eyes fixed on messages she was afraid to send. Maya approached her, invisible to mortal eyes, and reached into the space between heartbeats. "Not like that," the Librarian corrected gently. "You're trying to write her story for her. We're keepers, not puppeteers. Try again." Maya pulled back, remembering her training. Instead of pushing, she simply adjusted the angle of sunlight falling across Ruby's phone, illuminating words she'd written but hadn't sent. A small change, but sometimes that was all a heart needed to find its way. "Better," the Librarian nodded. "Now, let's look in on our other charges." The world shifted again, this time to a different part of the world, New York, where Frankie walked alone through evening streets. She moved like someone who had practiced the art of not being noticed, her steps precise and purposeful. The Librarian materialized briefly in a shop window's reflection, catching Frankie's eye for just a moment—long enough to plant a seed of curiosity that would bloom later. The origins of inception were showing their quantum roots in the way the Librarian worked. The past present in future working together with the unknown the known and the unknowable all at the same time. "And Johnny?" Maya asked. "Johnny isn't ready for us yet," the Librarian said, leading them back through the veils of reality to their Library. "His chapter is still writing itself. Sometimes the kindest magic is knowing when to wait." Back among the endless shelves, Maya watched as four different books pulsed with potential energy. "I still don't understand why we can't just—" "Push them toward happiness?" The Librarian finished her thought. "That's not love, dear one. That's puppetry. We maintain the space where love stories can unfold, but the stories themselves must be lived." She returned to her desk, where new words continued to appear on the open page. "Besides, happy endings are rarely the most interesting ones." Maya turned back to the shelf, noticing how Lester's book had stopped bleeding but now glowed with a faint blue light. "His pain is changing," she observed. "Yes," the Librarian agreed. "Pain either breaks or transforms. Lester is choosing transformation, though he doesn't know it yet. Watch." She waved her hand, and the air above her desk shimmered into a vision: Lester, standing now in his empty house, carefully wrapping glasses in newspaper. Each one he packed was a memory: wine shared on quiet evenings, champagne from celebrations now bittersweet, the mug Ruby always used for her morning coffee. The Librarian's magic caught the light reflecting off each glass, turning ordinary moments into prisms of possibility. Maya watched as Lester paused, holding Ruby's favorite wine glass. The stem was slightly crooked—a manufacturing flaw that had made it unique, made Ruby claim it as "her" glass. The Librarian whispered something, and for a moment, Lester saw not just the glass but every time Ruby had held it, laughed over it, let her fingers trace its imperfect curve. Then, with deliberate care, he wrapped it and placed it in the box with the others. "You didn't take the memory away," Maya noted, surprised. "Of course not," the Librarian replied. "Memories are part of the story too. But I helped him see them differently. Sometimes the most powerful magic is simply changing the angle of light." The vision shifted, flowing like water into a new scene: Ruby in Milan, surrounded by the bustle of a city that didn't know her. The Librarian's apprentice watched as her mark tingled, sensing the weight of untold stories pressing against reality. "She's trying to write herself a new ending," Maya observed. "No," the Librarian corrected, her voice carrying centuries of watched loves and losses. "She's trying to write herself a new beginning. There's a difference." She touched the page before her, and somewhere in Milan, a stranger smiled at Ruby in a way that reminded her of Lester—but not enough to hurt. Meanwhile, in another part of the Library, two books on completely distant shelves began to glow: one labeled "Frankie" and one "Johnny." Maya moved toward them, but the Librarian held up a hand. "Not yet," she said. "Their story needs darkness before it can find light. Sometimes we must let the night grow deeper before we light the way." Maya returned to her place by the Librarian's desk, watching as words continued to appear on the endless page. "How do you know?" she asked. "How do you know when to act and when to wait?" The Librarian smiled, and for a moment her form shifted, showing glimpses of all the faces she had worn through centuries of watching lovers meet and part and meet again. "Love has its own gravity, it's own entanglements" she said. "Our job is not to create it or direct it, but to maintain the space where it can find its own way. Sometimes that means whispering in the dark. Sometimes it means simply keeping the lights on so others can find their path." She turned a page, and somewhere in Melbourne, Lester felt a sudden urge to write. Not to Ruby this time, but to himself—words that would later become a story about falling and flying and the space between. In Milan, Ruby ordered a second coffee and began to sketch in her notebook, drawing lines that looked like bridges but might have been ways home. And in their separate corners of existence, Frankie and Johnny moved through their own nighttimes, unaware that their stories were already entangling in the Library's infinite shelves, waiting for the moment when parallel lines would finally cross. The Librarian dipped her never-moving quill in ink that shimmered like starlight. "Now," she said to Maya, "watch carefully. This is how we help rewrite the world without changing a single word that's already been written." Maya leaned forward, her apprentice mark glowing, as reality itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting to see what would happen next. Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters Falling: Threads of Light Part 6 - The Geometry of Broken Hearts

Lester knew from the beginning that love, at its core, was a trick of gravity—a force pulling two people together, making them believe in weightlessness, in flight, in forever. But ended the same way: impact. BAM! He had spent years trying to build something steady with Ruby, something that wouldn’t break under pressure. After they met and after seven years he had finally asked her to marry him, seven years of waiting, testing, making sure neither of them were stepping into something that would ruin them both. And yet, after all that care, all that time, she had left as though none of it mattered. He still wanted to be her husband. Lester had learned that the worst pain wasn’t physical—it was uncertainty. And Ruby left him with an avalanche of it. He sat in his quiet house, his mind running in loops, trying to decipher her silence. Was she afraid? Was she in danger? Or was she simply happy, wrapped in the arms of someone else? Either way, someone else, Mark, was there, standing in the middle of it all like a locked gate Lester had no key to. Mark Not a fight. Not an argument. Not even a goodbye. Just an absence that stretched into silence. And now, a man named Mark—a man with too many unknowns, a man who seemed to be moving in shadows.  Lester had not feared this—but still he appeared to be in the place where Lester once had been. Lester felt like an idiot for thinking this but still he was thinking this and knowing it wasn't entirely true too. The name Mark had floated to the surface of consciousness like a turd in a toilet. No clear definition, no hard lines—just a dark presence obscuring everything Lester seeing. Ruby wouldn’t answer his questions. Maybe she didn’t know how. Maybe she was lying because she was desperate. Maybe she wasn’t lying at all. A man with too many addresses, too many business failures, too many shadows trailing behind him. A man with a history of bankruptcy, civil judgments, and a tendency to be where he shouldn’t. A man who co-owned a property with someone named Kathryn in the Florida Keys, in a place that housed more than its share of registered sex offenders. A man whose name twisted in Lester's stomach like a sickness. He remembered how he found the VIN to a shitty Monte Carlo, which made him feel a bit better. A man who had somehow become Ruby's refuge. Or her captor. Or her undoing. Then again, maybe Mark was Ruby's bitch. Lester wasn’t looking for revenge. He wasn’t looking for confrontation. He was looking for clarity. If Ruby was safe, if she was being cared for, if she was thriving—then Lester might move on. But if Mark was a problem, if he was a threat, then Lester would not sit idle, Lester was a storm. Ruby's silence felt deliberate. Once, she had been full of words, spinning stories in the air like thread from a loom. Now, she had become an echo. The absence of you causes pain , she had written once. But was she feeling that absence now? Or had she filled it with Mark’s presence? She had once told Lester, Borrowed things always have to be returned.” But what if she had never belonged to Lester in the first place? What if, all along, she had been slipping through his fingers, waiting for someone else to claim her? Mark was in the way. Lester could feel it. But was he her dog, a helper, a barrier or a wall Ruby had built herself? Ruby Ruby’s silence was the most painful part. He could have lived with anger, could have faced her resentment, could have weathered the storm of words if only she had given him that. But instead, there was only distance, only unanswered messages, only a void where once there had been a fight, passion, a connection. He couldn’t let go. He still felt her everywhere. In the corners of the house they once shared, the house that he was now packing up, moving out, by himself. In the creases of old notes left in handwritten notebooks, an image of a four-leaf clover. He still reached for his phone, expecting her to call, expecting her to say I miss you the way she always had in the past. Ruby now seemed to be a woman made of whispers and smoke, a phantom that drifted through lives and left only a memory of warmth. She had convinced herself that disconnection was self-preservation. If she could cut herself away from Lester, from their past, from the ache of everything undone, then maybe she could start again. But disconnection was not the same as freedom. She was exhausted. A life of constant, unfulfilling motion, of falling into new situations, new men, new promises that never quite took shape. I saw this in my dream, she had once said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. Your memory looped inside my head. But was Lester a memory now, or was he still a tether pulling her back toward something real? Maybe Mark had become her safety net, or at least that’s what she told herself. He was practical. He had connections. He knew how to harass the world into working for him, even if it came at the expense of others, she might become an other, someone harassed. And maybe that’s what she needed now—someone who wouldn’t love her too much, who wouldn’t ask too many questions, who wouldn’t expect her to be whole. He was a furniture salesman for fucks sake. She said she wanted someone who was her intellectual equal. I guess she found that in Mark, a few steps down from Lester. There was nothing. Just a lingering ache, a love unresolved, a door left open just enough to let the cold seep in. Ruby was exhausted from running, but she knew no other way. She had always been a woman of escape routes, of doors left ajar, of carefully packed suitcases just in case. Even when she was with Lester, even when she had told herself she was happy, there had always been an unease—a feeling that she was waiting to fall. Maybe it had been her all along. She loved Lester, or at least, she had tried. She had wanted to be the woman he saw in her—the one he had loved so fiercely, so patiently, so fully. But she wasn’t that woman. Not really. She was the girl who had been passed between lovers, the girl who made men feel young, the girl who was borrowed but never truly owned. And now, Mark. Mark had appeared like an answer to a question she hadn’t realized she was asking. He didn’t ask for love. He didn’t demand devotion. He simply took up space beside her and let her exist without expectation. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t loved or adored. Lester had been safe. Lester had been home. Lester called her once the Altar of Venus, probably this meant he once worshipped her, and he did, in a way. Then, she had left home behind. She recalled, Sometimes Lester was the one who needed to be fixed and that gave her something to do. She seemed to want the things he had given her but just not from him. She thought about calling Lester sometimes. Thought about trying to explain. But what was there to say? You were right? I was afraid? I don’t know how to love without running? He deserved better than that. He deserved the kind of truth she wasn’t strong enough to give. And so she stayed silent. Frankie and Johnny Frankie had spent her life drifting between moments, never staying long enough for them to settle into permanence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want roots—she just never found the right soil. Johnny was different. He was the kind of man who stayed, who endured, who fought for the things he loved even when they burned him. And now, as fate would have it, their paths were about to cross. Neither of them knew it yet, but they were moving toward each other like two currents in the same river, destined to collide. Frankie would teach Johnny how to let go. Johnny would teach Frankie how to hold on. And in the process, they would reshape each other in ways neither of them could yet understand. Lester Lester wanted to believe that Ruby had simply moved on. That she was rebuilding her life without him, and while it hurt, he could learn to live with it. But something gnawed at him, something beyond heartbreak. A feeling that this wasn’t just about betrayal. It was about justice. The second she had the green card, she had gone. No more papers to be filed. No more waiting. No more him. Had she planned this all along? Had he just been another step in her unreachable journey? He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to be that man—the one who had been used, the fool left staring at an empty house, wondering how it had all gone so wrong. But wasn’t that exactly what he was? And what if he made a call? What if he spoke to the immigration office, let them take another look at their marriage, let them ask the questions he had been too afraid to ask?  He wasn’t a petty Man, so he was not gonna do that. But, the power was his, and that realization settled in his chest like a slow-burning ember and at the same time clawed at his guts like a weeping ulcer. He had options. He had leverage. And for the first time in months, he wasn’t the one left waiting. Lester sat with his phone in his hands, the screen open to Ruby's name. He had written a message a dozen times and deleted it just as many. He had a choice now—to reach for her one last time, to beg for an answer, to demand the closure he knew he would never get. Or to let go. Truth is, he reached out to her more than once a day. He would continue to do so. The power had shifted. Ruby might have left, but he was still here. Still standing. And maybe that was enough, for him. He exhaled slowly and placed the phone down. He couldn’t be the one left waiting anymore. But, Lester, was still in love. So badly in love, so so badly in love. The Grounding Frankie adjusted the collar of her coat and stepped into the cold air, her breath curling in the night like cigarette smoke. The city hummed around her, alive with people who moved with the kind of urgency that only mattered to them. She didn’t belong to anyone, and she liked it that way. Across town, Johnny tapped a cigarette against his palm, staring out over the river as the lights shimmered on the water. He wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, which was a relief. For once, his life wasn’t a mess of tangled emotions and misplaced loyalty. He liked the quiet, the anonymity. But he had the nagging sense that something was about to change. Frankie and Johnny had never met. Their lives moved on separate tracks, neither aware of the other. But fate—or something that looked a lot like it—had a habit of pulling strangers together when they least expected it. Both were walking toward something unknown. Both were about to collide with a truth that altered lives. Neither were falling, neither were flying and so they had no reason to suspect the harshness of the ground.  When you are grounding you have no idea about flying and you are free. Neither had any idea yet. Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters Falling: Threads of Light Part 5 - Quantum Entanglement

[Two people will be falling in love. We don’t know who they are yet, but we know how they feel.  They don’t know who they are yet either. Let’s call them Frankie and Johnny and Let’s take a break from Ruby and Lester.] She moves through the world like quiet rain, the kind that changes the shape of the earth. He watches her, drawn in by the gravity of something he can’t name. The air shifts when she speaks, her words carry their own weight, bending the space between them. He wonders if she knows—she feels it, too. They’ve never seen each other. They orbit each other in a city that belongs to neither of them, in a time that feels like it exists outside of reality. There each live late nights filled with words unspoken and mornings heavy with the weight of something unfinished. A love that does not fit into the confines of definition. I love that doesn’t exist. They are not building a future, not yet. They will inhabit a moment, stretching it as far as it will go, unwilling to acknowledge its inevitable end. They don’t know where to start. The first time they touch, it is not accidental. It is deliberate, slow, a question asked in silence. His fingers brush the inside of her wrist, and the answer is there, in the way she doesn’t pull away. In the way she leans into it, as if to say, yes, I feel it, too; it hasn’t happened; just an idea waiting to be inception. It won’t be a love that burns fast. It will smolder, deep and patient, not knowing its own strength. It will a quiet wanting, the kind that will linger at the edges of thought, pressing in when least expected.  They savor each other, not just in touch but in words, in glances held too long, in the pauses between breaths. Every moment is a choice. Every step closer is a promise that neither of them speaks aloud. They don’t have the words. The city does not care for their story. It moves on without them, indifferent to the way they cling to each second as if it might stretch into eternity. But they don’t need the world to understand. They only need this—the weight of a gaze, electric proximity, knowledge that something rare and real is unfolding. And even if it does not last, even if time or distance unravels the light and threads that bind them, they will carry this. The way it felt to fall, not knowing where they would land, only that, for now, they were suspended in something endless. No names. No pasts. Just this. Oh, it’s nothing. Everything they will want is in a room somewhere, somewhere in time.  God, how we all wish these two existed! They will be falling and for a long time. One day it will be flying. We don’t need to worry about the ground right now. Let’s savour her. Savouring Her   You are magnificent, a vision I ache to taste, slowly, deliberately, a first sip of something etherial I see you— your lips, soft and anticipating, I’m parting them with two fingers as I linger, only after exploring the warmth of your mouth, the heat of your breath, the quiet gasp of surrender. Every inch of you, a journey to savor, fingertips tracing secrets, tongue learning the language of your skin, bodies speaking in whispers and sighs. A pause— a stolen breath, a lingering touch, a drink to cool the fire before the embers ignite again, pulling us back into the slow burn. Every sense alive— the taste of you lingers, your scent clings to my skin, the sounds of your pleasures makes my skin tingle, the feel of you, burned into memory. Inside and out, in ways you’ve only imagined, in ways you will never forget. Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters Falling: Threads of Light Part 4

Lester sat in the half-light of the same city that neither loved nor loathed him, only tolerated his presence like an indifferent host tolerating a guest who had long overstayed. His phone sat in his hand, a dead weight, a relic from a past life still too recent to be history, too distant to be present. He had typed the message without thinking, his fingers moving as if possessed by something older than him—something primal, something desperate. The kind of desperation that sits just beneath the skin, just beneath the ribs, something warm and violent and entirely unwelcome. He had sent it before he could stop himself, before he could sanitize it into something noble, or even get ChatGPT to make it more emotionally intelligent. And now, there it was. Laid bare. I’m going to come out of this so fucking strong. Of course he would. Because there was no other choice. Because he had spent too much time dissecting his own ruin, turning it over in his hands, inspecting its jagged edges, wondering which parts had belonged to him and which had belonged to Ruby. He had wished he could stop caring about her. But if he did, it would be a disaster. Not for her. Not even for him. Just a disaster in the abstract sense—a collapsing of meaning, an erasure of purpose, like a novel missing its final pages. You’re just the object now. That part made him wince. An object of disaffections now so awful and probably temporary. But it was the truth. The grotesque situation had moved beyond heartbreak, beyond regret, beyond any romantic tragedy he could neatly frame in his mind. He had reached a place of basic survival. Ruby had become the symbol, the talisman of all the unspoken things, the placeholder for a truth too massive to be articulated. Ruby read the message and let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. There was no anger in her. No sadness. Just the recognition of a person she had known so intimately that his thoughts still echoed in her own mind, even from a continent away. He had always been the one who translated chaos into structure, and now, here he was, falling into his own disorder, writing to her like she was some ancient oracle who could make sense of his mess. But she wasn’t an oracle. She wasn’t even sure she was a person anymore. She had walked away thinking it would be cleaner, that distance would do what words could not. She had believed that space would heal things in the way time was supposed to. But Lester was still here. Still writing. Still believing that if he pressed hard enough against the shape of their love, it might reveal something new. She sighed and typed back: Yeah, I get that too. That’s my problem—I’m building a wall. I am feeling positive but also ‘missbraucht,’ and I’m a little bit scared of what that actually means. The German word sat there, looming, heavier than the others. Missbraucht —a word that, on the surface, meant abused, but when split into its pieces, when examined under the strange microscope of memory, meant something else entirely. Wrongly needed. Abused was for victims. But wrongly needed was something different. It meant that the one who was wrongly needed was neither villain nor martyr, just an object in someone else’s narrative. And Lester—Lester had been wrongly needed. Lester stared at her reply. His first instinct was to argue. I wasn’t wrongly needed. I was needed in the exact way that love requires. Love needs. Love clings. Love makes fools of the smartest people and saints of the unworthy. But maybe that was a lie, too. Maybe he had been needed for the wrong reasons. Maybe he had spent years mistaking Ruby's acceptance of him for something deeper, something truer. Maybe their love had been an exquisite kind of failure, the kind that leaves you stranded in a place neither can reach. Maybe it was meant to be reborn and from any perspective is extremely painful process. Still, something in him resisted the neatness of that explanation. He wasn’t ready to let her become just another lesson. He had spent his whole life hating the idea that people only existed to teach you things before they left. That wasn’t what this was. That wasn’t what she was. But he didn’t know what else to say. So he wrote the only thing he knew to be true: Love is never ideal but if you get it right it is perfect , a great responsibility. And I’d rather be wrongly needed by you than never needed at all. And for the first time in weeks, he felt something close to peace. Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters Falling: Threads of Light Part 3

When you fall, you can never tell how far - eventually it feels like flying and then you hit the ground. Lester woke up with the sensation of falling. Not the kind that startles you awake, the jolt of your body betraying gravity in the fragile space between sleep and waking—but a deeper fall, one that stretches across years, accumulates weight with every unsent message and every unspoken word. It was the kind of fall that, if prolonged, starts to feel like flight. But, as every unfortunate bird knows, there is always the ground. And the ground, despite its unwavering patience, never flinches when a body crashes into it. He lay still, the pain in his abdomen a stern schoolmaster reminding him that his body, too, had grown tired of his indecision. His post-surgical wounds whispered conspiratorially: We told you so. Ruby had left. Not just the room, not just the house, but the entire continent. She had packed her life into three suitcases, folded herself neatly into their constraints, and walked away, like some reverse Houdini escaping the chains of matrimonial illusions. Lester pressed a hand against his stomach. He was alone. He was waiting. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting at all. Maybe he was incubating, like a cursed prince in a fairy tale where the happily-ever-after had been outsourced to a disinterested third party. Ruby had always belonged to the wind. She drifted through cities, through lives, leaving faint fingerprints on the places she touched but never staying long enough for anyone to memorize their shape. She sat in a borrowed chair in a borrowed office, in a city that belonged to no one and everyone at the same time. She was drinking a cappuccino that cost as much as a minor organ. It tasted of burnt optimism. Her inbox was full—Jonathan, Christian, Mark—names that floated across her screen like benevolent spirits of capitalism, summoning her toward some nebulous sense of achievement. She had the vague sense that she had won something, that she had clawed her way free of a life that had been devouring her. But victory, she realized, was a dish best served with someone. She thought of Lester. He had been like a lighthouse, fixed in place, always watching, always calling her back from the horizon. She had once mistaken that for safety, but now she saw it for what it was: a tether. And she, by nature, was untethered. She left echoes instead of roots, carved memories into the air instead of stone. Love had always been a thing just out of reach, something she might have if she could hold still long enough. But she had never learned how to be still. He wrote to her, again. The words spilled out in a feverish, unedited rush: You weren’t the only one supporting this household. I was here too. I am still here. And despite everything, I will do what I can for you, even if I get nothing in return. But this time, he wrote with a different heart. A different brain, even. Perhaps it was the morphine talking, or perhaps it was clarity, that rare and elusive species usually spotted only in the aftermath of catastrophe. He had fallen once, but he was learning that falling was only dangerous if you never learned to land. And now, he was standing up. He told himself this was strength. That his love was the kind that endured, that remained, that built. That someday, if the universe willed it, they would cross paths again, and he would greet her not as a desperate man clinging to a past, but as someone whole. And if they found love again, it would be because they had chosen it—both of them, deliberately, like one chooses a tattoo at three in the morning with full knowledge that regret is part of the package. Ruby read his message late at night, stretched out on the floor of a friend’s apartment, the air mattress beneath her deflating in slow betrayal. The universe was good at irony. She sighed. I am a coward. I have always run from the things I don’t know how to fix. And she had run from Lester. From the life they had built, the house, the unspoken expectations, the weight of a love that had turned into something suffocating. She had once thought that if she held on tightly enough, her sheer willpower could save them. But love was not a matter of will, and whatever they had now, it was not love. She had tried to love like other people did, to stay in place and call it home, to choose certainty over wonder. But she had never belonged to certainty. She belonged to doorways, to train stations, to fleeting conversations that left more questions than answers. She loved Lester. She would always love Lester. But to be with him would mean to stop moving, and she had never known how. She closed her eyes and let her fingers hover over the keyboard before typing, finally: I am sorry for how we ended. I love you, but that love is not enough. I want to be happy. And I don’t believe that happiness is with you. She hit send before she could take it back. And then she cried, because sometimes the hardest thing in the world was not the leaving, but the knowing that you might never go back. Lester stared at the message. Read it again. And again. And then, something peculiar happened. He smiled. Not because he was letting go, not because he had lost, but because he had finally understood. Ruby was the kind of love that never ended—it changed, it reshaped itself, it traveled, but it never truly left. They were written into each other’s stories in ink that would not fade, no matter how many years or cities stood between them. One day, they would meet again. Maybe in another life, maybe in this one. Maybe at a train station where she would be passing through, maybe on a street where he would be buying oranges. Maybe not for years, maybe next week. It didn’t matter. Because love like this was never meant to end. It was meant to be found, again and again, as many times as it took.   He reloaded her phone with credit. He ordered a sandwich. And then, for the first time in a long time, he looked forward to the future—not as a waiting game, but as an adventure. Falling. You never know how far. Eventually, it feels like flying. And then, you hit the ground. And if you’re strong enough, you get back up. Falling: Threads of Light All Chapters Falling: Threads of Light Part 2

It feels like the realization that love doesn’t disappear—it mutates. It changes shape, changes weight, changes texture. It doesn’t leave, it just shifts, settling into the gaps of your day, the quiet moments before sleep, the way the wind moves through an open door. It feels like standing still while the world continues, the absurdity of traffic lights turning red, green, yellow—over and over—while you remain in the same spot, unsure if you even need to cross the street anymore. It feels like knowing that time doesn’t heal so much as blur. The edges soften, the sharpness dulls, but the outline remains. And maybe that’s all it will ever be—an outline. A shape you recognize but can’t quite touch anymore. This is how it feels now. And maybe that’s enough. For now, it is what it is...