Schrödinger’s Lovers

We often tell the story of couples splitting up because one cease to love the other. Love songs weeping the loss, weeping to no longer hold the place on their pedestal, stomping the floor in rage at the sight of the loved one moving forward, without us. Spitting out their pain of being cheated, betrayed, replaced. What about the couples that love each other but need to break up anyway?

After hitting the wall, after a long, brutal, and painful fall, holding hands, they look at each other. Around them everything is white, everything is night, and the asphalt marked on their bodies the tracks of the crash. Skinned and bruised, they stay still. They’re floating. Between life and death, the lovers hover between the splinters of glass, the shattering voices, and the cutting sob.

She holds his arm like we catch hold of a castaway, like we hang on to someone about to disappear. Her face misshapen by the pain, her heart in pieces, she wants to scream. But in this suspended moment, sounds aren’t allowed. So she screams in silence, begging to hold on while he sees his soul slowly fading away. The shock has carved his chest, leaving his heart broken, mutilated, dying. He wants to let himself float, to let himself go. 

Holding hands, here they are: stuck in-between, in an black hole  where time doesn’t exist, suspended, and lost.

How cruel life seems to be, and how sweet death now feels. Sweet, but lonely. Their fingers interlaced, they don’t know if they still should fight. If they should keep suffering as a price to pay to overcome that crash, or if they should surrender and die slowly and quietly, until the pain completely fades, driving them apart until they no longer can see each other, feel each other, and eventually, not even remember.

The lovers lay there, wounded, floating, suspended between two realities of which none seems to be obvious enough to be chosen. Schrodinger’s lovers hence remain stuck, not truly alive, yet not completely dead.