Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

Whatever unnatural cord bound our souls together wouldn’t allow one to survive without the other.

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you,” he whispered, hoarse, tortured. My throat ached. “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

next to the soul I’d loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one, we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.

as I gazed upon the first bramble, I thought of how the world reinvents itself year after year, century after century, summer deepening always into autumn, winter brightening always into spring, growing new flowers from old roots, and I thought of how it feels to hold you, each season of you, our love blossoming afresh, year after year, century after century, new flowers from old roots, an eternal seed from which life will always bloom —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

“My love for you could fill an ocean, Evelyn.” There was an awful resignation to her tone. “But it can’t stop the tide of time.”

The joy and pain we shared had knotted the very fabric of us together.

Because that’s the thing about humans—we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.

“The Evelyn I know … they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. Even though they’ve lost everyone they’ve ever loved, and they miss them in the next life, and the next, and the next. Never have they developed hard edges like I have. Never have they tried to protect themselves from that pain. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing I know. The most human thing I know.”

Do you know how rare you are, in a world where the sky rains fire?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the poet.” A sigh, long and low. “Though, without you, there would be no poetry. I would have only the harsh lens of my own worldview. I wouldn’t be able to see the beauty of life, because I only see it through your eyes. Muse is too simple a word for what you are to me.”

My mouth twisted into a rueful smile. “And yet, life after life, you take away the possibility of the cottage by the sea.” Silence swelled between us at the mention of our inevitable fate. “Please know that what I do, it is for us, for this.” He spoke gently, as though his proclamations might break me. “If I didn’t, the hell we’d go through … Please trust me. Do you trust me?”

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.” The words sent a ripple of familiarity through me, a ghost of a memory. The sensation that our love was a palimpsest, written over and over again so that I could no longer read the original.

All I wanted was a life with him. All I wanted was a life.

the whole world a backdrop for our doomed love, for our infinite fates.

For all the past versions of us.

As Arden withdrew the inevitable knife, her final words had been: “Until we meet again, my love.”

“I’m sorry. If we end up arrested and separated, I won’t be able to get to you before we turn eighteen. And we can’t turn eighteen. We can’t.”

my heart is a haunted house surrounded by a moat of my own digging, kept empty of warmth so that I will not miss it come winter. skin hunger; the feeling that if you do not touch another human soon you will lose your mind. it hurts, the absence of it, but less so when you have only ever been cold. and then, in you come. throwing open the windows, sweeping ash from the hearth so that you might light a new fire. and my skin sings for you, my bones ache for you, but the ghosts stalking the hallways tell me that we will not leave this place alive. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

I could tell him that he was, in all meaningful ways, my home.

“Don’t break her heart, all right?” Mum said, voice muffled in his woollen jumper. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied roughly, a thousand emotions pulsing beneath the words.

But our love story was not like that. It was blood and pain and death, an awful cycle doomed always to repeat.

I laughed, albeit bitterly. “By design, you don’t have any loved ones.” There was a heavy pause, in which I feared I may have wounded him too deeply, but then he muttered, “I have you.”

There was always Arden. There would always be Arden.

“Sometimes it feels like my heart breaks when yours does,”