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.

“And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction.

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

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.

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

There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun.

to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

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

I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. I feel your hand in places I’ve touched.

I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here.

Dear Raspberry, 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. Not that it didn’t before—Garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound—but now its song’s for me alone.

Maybe I’ve over-read the simple word with which you close your letter. (But I can never over-read you, and the word you chose is not simple.)

My Heart’s Own Blood, I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves.

She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.

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.

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