There was once a young man who loved a young woman, but Distance and Oceans and Time stood between them like hopeless, endless infinities.
The Distance pitied them, but there was nothing she could do. She tried to shrink her length, and she tried to pull her miles more closely together. The Distance even tried to move continents, but her power was not enough. The Distance wept along with the lovers, for she had been trying for many thousands of years to ease the pain she caused so many.
The Oceans were cruel, very unlike the Distance. The Oceans did not care. They went on churning and reaching and tossing their heartless waves. They ignored the tears the young woman dropped in its foam, and their horizons spread out all the wider whenever the young man dared to dream across its expanse. The Oceans scoffed at them both.
Time wished dearly that he could increase his speed so that the lovers could be together again, but Time was also constrained. He knew the pain of the young man and the young woman, for he was never given a moment's rest. He hardly remembered when he had begun, and he did not think he would ever end, but he knew that the time humans had together was merely a speck of a second, and he did not think it at all fair that they should have to be parted. Time could do nothing but continue to drop one grain of sand at a time, one eternity of a second to the next.
The Distance and the Oceans and the Time stretched on and on, and the young woman sometimes wondered if she had dreamed up the young man. She wondered if he did not exist at all. After all, she had not seen him for so long, and even when she had, it had only been for the smallest fraction of a heartbeat. If it were not for the one thing he had given her, she was certain she would believe he had been only the happiest dream of her life. The silence of the distance, and the roaring of the ocean, and the unfathomable slowness of time seemed to prey upon every memory of being with the young man that the young woman treasured.
Yet she was his.
She knew she was his because, regardless of the things that separated them, he lived. He saw the same sun and the same moon and the same stars even if he saw them at different times. And she knew he was real because on the morning they had said their goodbyes, he had placed around her neck the symbol of his identity. He had given her his identity--it was stamped into the cold metal at her throat, and by so doing, he gave her assurance that he would come back for her and that his love would not end.
The young man's identity was the young woman's only hope. She wore it every day, and she pressed it to her lips every evening, wishing more than anything that it was he she could kiss. And although she wished thus, she did not take for granted that bit of the young man she possessed, for that bit was all she had that belonged to him. It shone bright with his hopes and his dreams and his name and his faith, and that, after all, was really all the young woman needed.
For haven't we all been given a gift, an identity perhaps, that reminds us of who it is we belong to? And haven't we also been given a promise from the one who will return for us regardless of Distance and Oceans and Time?
