Meteor in life's sky changed my flow

They say when you’re born you start dying. A slow, invisible leak from the moment you take that first, shocking breath. My leak felt more like a hemorrhage. I was twenty-eight and already a ghost, haunting my own life. I moved through my apartment, my job, the city, with the hollow efficiency of a machine running on fumes. I marked time not by joy, but by the gradual dimming of things: the fading of a favorite shirt, the quieting of a once-beloved song, the slow erosion of friendships into polite, monthly texts.

Then, in a bookstore smelling of old paper and dust, I met you.

You were arguing passionately with the shop’s ancient cat about the merits of postmodernism versus magical realism. Your hair was a chaotic sunrise of red and gold, and you gestured with a book in each hand as if conducting an invisible orchestra. I stood frozen in the Mystery section, a forgotten Agatha Christie in my hand, listening to you passionately explain to a disinterested tabby why García Márquez would, unequivocally, win in a literary duel....