Everything changed on a lazy Thursday afternoon. The ground shook, the earth shivered, and one tiny piece of the human experience fell into place. A girl had her first kiss.

It had seemed impossible. It was impossible. Until it happened.

The text message arrived on her phone minutes before she dared look at it. Never before had she rushed from the library so quickly, back to the room of the boy who lay waiting for her. The journey through the winter twilight felt like the end of a dream. She was about to wake up. Color had been leached from her imagination, the unconscious storyline had entered uncharted territory, the normal laws of physics had surrendered. The world had spiraled too far into fantasy, and it was time to wake up.

Because what he proposed, what she was returning for, was impossible.

She had knocked on that door a hundred times. She had entered through it a hundred times. She had closed it behind her a hundred times. But not once had she locked it. Nor flicked off the dorm room light, as he now instructed. Sudden blackness fell around her, like a curtain drop. The End. And yet, somehow, it wasn’t.

Standing there, body echoing with each heartbeat, she wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. This was impossible. She was about to wake up.

Everything inside of her was spinning, everything outside was impossibly still. The universe was exploding within her chest. Human evolution was unfurling itself like a silver scrawl beneath her skin. There was a blank space for her story, waiting.

But she couldn’t do it. She was estranged from any possibility of intimacy. She was illiterate in the language of bodies. She was a broken instrument that had never been tested for sound. She was an outsider looking in. Someone else was supposed to be in this dark room.

And yet, there were his arms, reaching for her. There she was, being reached for. And there were their lips, pressed together.

The ground shook, the earth shivered, and one tiny piece of the human experience fell into place.

And then everything was just as it had been. Another boy and girl, kissing softly in bed. On a lazy Thursday afternoon.