1


It's eventual, because everything is.
All the bandits, liars and lovers - they all meet one another by some event. It's a small world, they'll say. But the special ones, the pairs bound by fate, they will always overlap. They waltz the reincarnation dance, not caring if the life is the same or not. They find one another in the face of every stranger. They believe in miracles, you see, because miracles believe in them.

Good bandits never die, they find paradise in jasmine kingdoms. They immortalize themselves amongst gods.

2


Of all the silly places, a park. Of all the places to see her again. As undramatic as it is, he didn't recognize her at first. She was just a pretty young girl sitting on the bench two down from him, reading a travel magazine. But something made him keep looking.

"Oh." She said when they locked eyes. "Oh!" Her mind was floating downriver; her childhood wanderlust; her hero whispering : homehomehome.

3


It's like that joke. You know, the one that starts just like this. 'A girl walks into a bar...' set up, punchline, everybody laughs.

A girl walks into a bar.

None of the drunks stop muttering in their glasses long enough to look up, to wonder what a girl like her is doing in a place like this. The neon light leaks through the curtains, edging her hair with red and green light. It looks to him like she's on fire.

"What are you doing here?" He can't get his mind away from the prisma deserts and ebony suns.
Her eyes are jewel bright when she smiles, he is nostalgic for baby teeth.
"Looking for you, what else?"

4


She smiles, and thinks of that box of paper mache masks under her bed, the newest made not long ago. All red and bright and bleeding onto her fingers. Each has a heartbeat, you know. And the books she filled with stories and doodles and love letters to someone she met once. (She once made sand castles out of dust and pretended it was home.)

She's so glad she doesn't have to worry about someone breaking her heart, she gave hers to him a long time ago - before she even knew what it meant.

"I know you" she says to him, even when he isn't there, "So well."