Forget Me Not

by Karissa Kinword

“I’ve lost every friend, but you.” “I’m not your friend, Silas.” “No, you are my reason.”

“I’ll follow you wherever you go.”

It would take at least a cycle and a half for the transport ship to make its way entirely back to the Otera.

The Glades were perfect. A beautiful oceanic moon, thriving culture, black sand beaches.

The man with the ocean flecked gaze and sideways smile who came to me so often in my sleep I just learned to expect it.

There was a comfortable silence then, one where we both basked in the unsaid. He and I spoke to one another like this often, drawn out quietude, mirrored expressions. Our own secret conversations, even under the curtain of my closed fantasy.

Even when I thought I had found the same happiness I craved in those fleeting hours asleep, I still caught myself wishing to float into unconsciousness on occasion.

I sat in the darkness so long I resorted to a tincture of natural oils to aid in the rest process, and it wasn’t long before exhaustion overtook me again. Along with the tranquil sound of the waves, sleep swept me away like the tide.

And then he had me. The girl that didn’t exist. For as long as Silas could remember, I took up a stable residency in his dreams. As a friend, a partner—a paramour.

“The strength of these old bones does deceive me, Birdie,” he agreed, pulling me on top of his body and parting my legs over his hips. “But you’d sooner call me manic than tired if I ever wished you away for sleep.”

“I have never felt a euphoria near comparable to the likes of you.”

“Can you take me harder, little bird?”

“That sound.” He half sighed, half chuckled, delirious on how close I was getting him. “You make me depraved, dream girl, you make me—oh, fuck.”

“Don’t you dare stop on me,”

Just like that night, he would often wake up in briefs sticky with his own seed, cursing himself alone in his bed and wondering who and why I was. A fever dream, his own personal form of glorious torture.

This system of intergalactic travel has opened the gates to millions of new unimaginable discoveries, allowing ventures well beyond the mind’s capability of what exists in a space that never ceases to unfold.

“Ah look, new travelers just pulled in.”

There’s a sudden tightening in the cavity of my chest like my heart is in a vice grip, and I’m left mouth agape as I take the stranger in.

I know you.

With all the time he’s spent inside his head with me, committing my face and body to memory, this feels more like a pleasant nostalgia than an introduction.

“No—no it’s just,” he pauses to collect his thoughts, “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”

He knows how he knows me, of course. The most stable relationship his life has ever had, coming in the form of a reoccurring dream woman—but he’s not about to say that.

“Yes,” I agree. “You look very familiar to me, too.”

“A book such as this one stays with you long after you’ve put it down,”

“Well, it’s been my pleasure to meet you...” He stops where he’s stuck on my name. “Eliza.” “Eliza,” he repeats back slower, stuck on the syllables, letting them dance on his tongue.

I take his hand in mine and shake it softly. And as if it weren’t before this moment, everything becomes real. Not a dream, I’m not asleep. He’s real, and he’s standing in front of me, and he doesn’t disappear into dust when I touch him.

“You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?”

“Even at night, in moonlight, I have no rest... Why did they trouble me? Oh, gods, gods...”

“Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other...”

YOU.

I get this strange notion that he knows the things that resonated with him in this book will either be a deterrent, or like a light bulb switched on for me. A shared epiphany perhaps. Maybe just a twisted way of making me feel closer to a stranger.

“But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.”

In fate I will find you.

“You’re gonna come for me, Birdie?” I nod back at him. “Let me feel it.”

Now it feels different. Not just because he is real, but because I want him to be. I know him to be. And I’m not dreaming.

Silas realized quickly after he got her undressed that he couldn’t fuck her like he wanted to fuck me, simply because, well—she wasn’t me. He couldn’t pour that type of endearment into someone else, even if it was just pretend.

He can’t think of me like this without losing composure.

Silas wants that look again, underneath him, begging for him, dripping in satisfaction.

The sex was supposed to make him forget about me, not crave me. Silas knows innately that there will never be another woman to replace who I am to him. That there isn’t meant to be. And maybe I know that too, but he’ll have to fight for it.

I’m sorry, I see written in his eyes. Me too, I say back.

I walk a little faster to hear him better, interested in everything that is Silas. The man himself and how he came to be walking in front of me. Maybe it would explain some things. Why I see him every night in my dreams, why I’m cursedly in love with him despite just learning his name a day prior.

“I’ve met you a thousand times then, Book Girl,” he says. “In a thousand stories.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m entirely by myself.”

“And I’m never alone in my dreams.”

If there’s a moment of realization, it should be this one. A subtle way he’s trying to tell me something that I don’t know if I want to be true.

Silas has a sudden inclination to punch him, to crack the bones in his nose for talking about me like that, for talking about his girl like that—and half a mind to leave him at the bar and go to me right then, finding me alone.

On any moon, had someone referred to Silas as a pirate, he’d have leveled the man instantly. That was an insult that you didn’t throw around to a Mako, the insinuation of pillaging and taking advantage of a land’s people was one that didn’t go unaddressed.

The trilling sound of space that’s normally placid is deafening, because the implications of Silas and I being alone can only end in one of two ways: platonically cordial, or like it usually does in my dreams. Naked, all consuming, never close enough to one another.

It takes a second before either of us even realize we’re still connected at the hand, and another second passes before I let go, because it just feels so natural. Like muscle memory.

I’m supposed to be holding Silas’s hand, he’s used to it. He already knows the smallness of my palm trapped in his own and the dainty tips of my fingers against his knuckles.