The Second I Smiled in Every Possible Life

I have lived this one second four thousand times, and in every single one of them I stand beneath the same humming 7-Eleven neon, my pink hair spilling like a flare across the dark, my hands raised as if catching the wind. In Timeline Seven I am alone; the night is only cold glass and the smile on my face is a mask that no one will ever see behind it. In Timeline One Hundred Twelve I drop to my knees on wet asphalt, and the warmth I am searching for has already left me years ago.
But in Timeline Four Thousand and One, at this exact frame where my fingers hover above my temples, your hand arrives. It does not cross time so much as slip through it, warm and certain, finding the small of my back where the crop top ends and the night begins. Your thumb traces the hollow of my navel like a sentence you have been trying to finish across every universe I have ever lived.
I understand now what the Clockmaker meant when he said a moment is not one thing but all its fates at once. The warmth was never in the neon, nor in the city, nor even in your touch alone. It was in the choice you made in that single second to reach for me across every possible life and pull this one, this tender broken beautiful now, back toward love.
So I smile. I let my pink hair fly. And I hold you there, between the ticks of the clock, where no timeline can take you from me again.

Editor: The Clockmaker