After draconian population control measures were instituted, things changed. But love remains.
We had fifteen minutes.
It took three for Nuru to wake up properly; the tray rattled out of the wall like a final breath, dispensing her with all the clinical efficiency of a morgue. Her fingers were cold. Too cold.
They warmed, and colour flushed her cheeks as her beautiful eyes rolled in their sockets. Sightless and unfocussed, I could tell she was still half-asleep and seeing nothing more complicated than blotches of colour and light. Mostly steel grey and chrome, in blurred rectangles describing a room that would have fitted right in with the thesaurus entries for bland, boring and nondescript.
Even once she focussed, she still looked confused. It wasn’t until her eyes met mine that recognition bloomed across her face, and a smile unfurled like the most beautiful flower ever grown.
That smile hurt. The hug didn’t quite erase the pain, the memory of the way the edges had quivered, the meaning of it. The hesitancy. I knew what it was. I’d seen a mirror. Even the blurred shapes of us in the frosted-mirror surface of the walls was enough to show the difference. I’d been the taller of us, once.
Pain never quite went away. It didn’t matter how much time passed, and we only had eleven minutes.
It wasn’t enough.
So we talked. We talked like we had all the time in the world and not a single care. Sitting on the sterile, hard tray that had spat Nuru back out into the harshness of reality because old knees don’t like standing for even six minutes straight, we held hands.
She felt hot against me, and her grip was so strong. I felt like she could break me without even trying, shatter my fingers like the most delicate of eggshells squeezed too hard by eager children during an egg hunt. She was the stronger of us now, but still weak in her own way. Tears dripped off her chin, and she leaned heavily against me, even as I leaned against her sniffling like I had a severe head-cold. We both trembled. Time’s cruel hands had wrought their changes, albeit in different ways.
But time could only hold sway for so long. Three more minutes.
“I’m sorry, Gabby.”
Now it was my turn to try and speak through tears. Despite our situation, I hadn’t had as much practice at talking through tears as Nuru, and my words were garbled, my tongue clumsy. It didn’t matter. That was what I wanted to say, that there wasn’t anything to apologise for. We didn’t have time for apologies.
Nuru shushed me with a finger over my lips. Then, carefully pushing a strand of my wispy grey hair, she silenced me further with a kiss.
There wasn’t enough time for everything we wanted to say. There was just enough time for us.
