Pangea

In the beginning,

We were one world

Continents that were married to each other

Interlocking lands

Intertwined hands

But even love wasn’t strong enough to keep us together

Pangea,

We were a supercontinent

Larger than the sum of our parts

We walked along the surface of our beating heart

Until it fractured

Until the Earth ruptured

In the new world,

We breathed the same air

Until it was dangerous

Until we were torn apart

Our bodies were captured

We awaited the rapture

It didn’t matter how much I loved you

Fate didn’t care what we believed

A rift grew like ripped seams

An ocean tore through the space in between

To form a growing breach

Until you were out of reach

The virus forced a siege

Held us hostage in our own bodies

We were separated 

We were isolated

And there was still desolation

The end felt sudden, but

We were always a world with fault lines

Before there’s an earthquake,

There is continental drift

We were already collapsing

The life cycle is a continuous series of shifts

The virus exaggerated out afflictions

There is a period of incubation

Illness is a gradual deterioration 

You died slowly.

The world is always ending

We are cyclical existences

That stretch across time

We can’t stop this collective demise

Scars on the Earth’s surface opened and closed 

But never healed

How many times have our bodies died and died again?

You were buried under layers of sediment

You laid down on an ocean bed

But our love still was not dead

One day, our fossilized bones will resurface

Physical forms are imperfect

Your lungs collapsed

But I will be with you

One day, we will breathe again

The Earth will die many times over

And in its destruction, something new will form

We are worlds born and reborn

There will be another

There are millennia waiting to be discovered

We will find each other again. 

–Fabienne de Cartier