sadoeuphemist:

writing-prompt-s:

When someone’s heart breaks so does a piece of our world; this creates fissures, valleys, and even cracks in the pavement. Tell me the story behind the Grand Canyon.

You
understand that love is tectonic. That it is the ground beneath us. You
think of heartbreak, and imagine upheaval, destruction. She will leave
you, and with two words tear apart the foundations of the life you have
built together. The earth will disintegrate beneath you, leaving you in
free-fall, stumbling desperately for footing. The earth will fissure
into an insurmountable chasm, black and jagged and infinitely deep. You
imagine violence. You imagine romance.

Here is the truth: this chasm took us lifetimes to create. We rose
blindly from the oceans, carried together by the implacable currents of
geology. Our love was sea and salt air, an intricate, painful process of
fusion that brought us onto dry land. Our passion was heat, it was
magma. At points, we did not understand where one of us stopped and the
other began. We formed mountains. We formed continents.

It was the memory of water that ate away at us, an imperceptible
stream rushing backwards to the sea. We married young. We had never
known anything but each other. The river grew from a dozen tiny
tributaries, a dozen points of regret. And even as we rose past the
unstable memories of our youth, the river remained steady, level,
cutting ever deeper. There were landslides, certainly, violent and
dramatic, but seemingly harmless tremors in the scope of history. We quarreled. We had
our lovers’ spats. And quietly, imperceptibly, we tore each other apart.

You can see it, preserved in layers, our history carved in scars. We
knew. We must have known all along. This is our love. This is a canyon.
This is lifetimes worth of heartbreak. People stand on the edge of what
we shared and gaze upon the bloody fossilized remnants of love, and call
it beauty.

You fall in love, and feel the earth shake beneath you. What you do not yet understand is that it will always be in motion.