What’s your one wish?

God once gave just one man one wish.

This man wished for someone that would be forever beautiful; to be in love eternally- that was his one wish.

God granted this wish and the man lived madly and deeply in love for many lifetimes. He sat with his lover in orbit  and watched Redwood trees grow from saplings, existing sturdy for 2,000 years, never needing to budge because trees get it right the first time, but even a tree grows weary after two decades. The man and his lover watched them grey and fall and become part of the earth once again. They saw the beginnings and the endings to many things.

As the universe expands time stretches; and so did the couple, stretch apart. The man was old and weary like a Redwood that’s done all there is to do as a tree. His lover was still young, beautiful, imperfect in all the right ways.

Eventually time stretches across a galaxy and the couple would sometimes wave to each other from passing planets.

One minute of one day of many lifetimes (a spec of dust in a long abandoned house, one grain of sand on the Earth, one lonely tear in the vast oceans of shed despondence) the man and his lover ended up unusually close to one another. They had not heard each others voices in many eons (a blink of god’s eye, a drop in the tidal waves of time the man and his lover had existed) but the man still remembered his lover’s voice, like they had never stopped conversing.

Somehow- after so long- he was taken aback all over again by his lover’s beauty. And there was a distinct and perplexing feeling of nothing in the basis of himself, in his roots.

And with that, he set his lover free.

The man had finally learned- nothing is eternal.