They are both pretending to know what the other's face will do next, and neither of them can, because they have never seen each other before, and it is the only time they ever will meet as strangers. Look at them. She turns the little candle glass in her fingers.
He laughs a half-second too late and then again, correctly. The whole surface of the thing is unrepeatable and they know it too, I can smell the shine of it on them, the good fear.
But then he says the word. He says maybe we could do this again. Again. As though the light could hold still and be poured out twice. As though this table, this laugh, this exact temperature of nerves, is a thing you set down and pick back up. I nearly fall out of the air.
And she says yes. Calmly. She writes the next one into the future like it is already spent, sometime next week, and something in me wants to hover over them both and shout: you are doing the impossible and you are scheduling it.
I do not envy them the many. I have my one, and my one is enough; I have already danced, already tasted the split second of dusk, already met the whole of my kind at once above the water. But if I had their thousands, if I had a stack of dusks so tall I could afford to call one of them ordinary, I would not save the good fear for later.
Go back tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow, that scandal you carry around loose in your pockets. Go back and be strangers on purpose. Turn the little glass in your fingers as if the candle will only burn once.
It will.
You just get to forget that, and I never will.