The desire for tending each other stirred in them immediately: a coup de foudre that did not vanish after the flash, only deepened. They entered the water together without expressly deciding to do so, drawn again and again to its edge and to each other. What passed between them did not feel found, but remembered. They stepped into something already moving and turned their faces to the sun like flowers gaining strength from what it fed on.

Even in silence they danced in quiet alignment, a pas de deux.

Nearness required no instruction. White forms moving across the far edge of the water. Gliding soundlessly, wind echoing in their feathers, they became one movement as though finishing a seam ripped at the world’s beginning. The lake held their reflection a moment too long as though reluctant to release them back into themselves. What looked back at them beneath the surface was not merely a reflection, but a recognition of another life they had once lived. Clementine felt it clearly in the twilight pause, in the space between their star-sung nights together beneath the draping vines. Her wish came softly then, carried in the quiet between breaths, shaped by tenderness:

Let what passes between us not be worn thin by time or dulled by the living of it. This and always this, untouched.

The morning took Valentine first. He had been drawn to the edge by something he could not name. The light had just begun to gather on the northern bank of the lake, the field of wildflowers radiant in the mist. By the time Clementine reached the spot where the lake opened up, only a ripple remained where Valentine had been. Solitary and silent, she understood. What they had wished had not been denied. She did not call out. She did not break the mid-morning air with her cries. She merely remained until fate received her as it had received him, without hesitation or question. She offered no resistance. Oftentimes, in her dreams, they still float together, only now in time and space without urgency, settling and softening the edges of what had been for them.

Sometimes, when the light loosens and the world hesitates its next breath, the song of the swans can be heard. For a moment, any who hear it stand entranced by this prelude to fanfare. White bodies, no longer divided by light and dark, gathered into a new life. Wings caught, feathers threaded together, necks curved toward each other in a sort of homecoming. For the first time and forever, they are held in a singular moment: an eternal encore.

Inspired writing by Kelly Cooper