there once was

it finally dawned upon me today that love comes at a price, and the claim to love without having to sacrifice something dear is facile. 

when i found you again, you were like an old, familiar stranger. familiar, because there was a point in time where our lives ran tangent to each other's; and stranger, because they soon diverged and grew independent of each other. 

when i found you again, it felt like we had time-travelled back to where we had last left off, continuing right from the point of tangency. but i must have made some careless miscalculations to think that a tangent could ever intersect a curve. a line that runs tangent to a point on a curve eventually diverges from the curve, after all. of course when our lines finally intersected, they were new lines from new equations. you felt too familiar to be something new, but similarity is not the same as congruency. 

in the time we had spent completely dichotomized from each other, we laughed, we cried, we regret, we learn—all, as almost strangers. from where we stand today, those are things of the past, however messy, however neat. perhaps those were the necessary workings it took to get us to our new equation of intersecting lines, and perhaps where i found you again was a new plane on which both our lives could finally dance upon in convergence and collision. 

i must realise that the you now is not the you hithero, yet you—your past and present—come together. any change, even to fit our current ideal, of your past risk the possibility of a different resultant equation at present. if i changed your past, then it automatically becomes not you—i cannot have you present and post without having you past. perhaps we cannot get to the you at present by a different past, in the same way we cannot multiply any number by any other number other than one to get that same number in the first place (e.g. 7 must be multiplied by 1 and only by 1 to get a 7; 83749 must be multiplied by and only by 1 to get back 83749, etc.). 

of course even the mere thought of what detestably once was burns against my chest like hot charcoal, yet i know that love does not come without a price. and if this is the price i have to pay for love, for you, then, i will empty out all my change to prove my love for you, past, present, post, in the most complete of ways i can ever hope for.