This Is How You Lose the Time War

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.

I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.

Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.

Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying.

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.

PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.

To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.

It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.

I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned.

Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay's shriek. She collects blues and keeps them.

You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain.

She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I'm here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation.