I awoke one pale morning to find a wooden coffer laying at the foot of my bed. It was a bashful coffer, taking up the width of a foot on its largest side. Unlike the much more opulent cousins of its namesake, this poor coffer was simple, I would struggle to even prescribe it the designation of ornate. It bore only a singular keyhole at its center, but with no key present at the time of its emplacement, I was left with nothing to open the thing. Still, I placed my palms upon the sides of the coffer and felt it thrum to life like a machine. I felt a pulse, a muted vibration, beneath my fingertips that beat from within the coffer. A friendly orange light leaked from the seams and out into my room. I lifted it and was surprised at its weightlessness. I would not be surprised if it had begun to float on its own buoyancy through the air (though I admit I was too careful to try).
This process of whirring the coffer to life—feeling its warmth and bathing in its light—brought me much joy through the following week, though I was still left baffled at how to open the thing. This was until—on a particular night long after you had drifted off to sleep through the phone and I was left to my own devices in my room—a premonition slithered its way into my body and I felt the overwhelming need to hold my phone, with you still sleeping inside of it, up to the coffer. Between my hands, I watched as the phone shifted and folded infinitely upon itself to turn into a key (oddly enough, I could still hear you breathing from the key). I slid the key into the keyhole of the coffer, twisted it, felt it click, (it was at this moment that I swear I heard a giggle from the coffer itself!) and let the lid unfurl.
You see, the coffer felt so weightless for the simple fact that there was nothing inside of it. Well, I suppose I should say there was nothing inherently material within the coffer.
The orange light within the coffer erupted outwards and enveloped my mind and body. This was not a simple orange light, it was the light of a sun that still chooses to rise decades, centuries, ad infinitum into the future. Yes, it was the light of the future within that coffer, and once the light had settled, I had come to see what it was shining upon. It was the future of us. Two souls intertwined and refusing to be separated. Bathed in a golden light, hands extended and joined together. Everywhere I looked I saw you. Striding atop a calm sea, below the dawn and the dusk, in every country at every time, at the center of an impossible labyrinth, with every eye and every distance, behind me in a mirror, sitting in a backyard garden adorned with a litter of three sleeping kittens, napping beneath the midday sun in a quiet bedroom, being snowed upon, under an apple tree and between the trees in an apple orchard, I saw your name repeated in every word of every book I read, in night and in day, in sunrise and in sunset, in the soil and in the rain, in the entryway of the house where we will live together, on the swingset of a playground of the school I attended fifteen years ago that has long been demolished, eating food at a restaurant that has yet to be built by people who have yet to be born, on the white sandy beaches of an ocean that waits to be drowned, in my tableside desk drawer, in the bed that I am about to lay upon, I saw your face in my future and the future in your face, the inconceivable universe. It seemed to me that in every impossible place, and at every impossible time, you were always there, and you will always be there, and I will be there beside you.
I closed the coffer and felt it thrum once more, and as I held my fingertips up to my neck, it did not surprise me to realize that my own pulse matched the beat of the box.