This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or

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

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.

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

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.

Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

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.

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...

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