This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know;

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.

I wanted to be seen.

So in this letter I am yours.

Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No—I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you. That this—whatever this is—would be better served by tenderness, by gentle kindness. Instead I write of spilling out your sap-guts with reeds. I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

But if you hunger, I swell.

How I love to have no armor here.

I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time. I dream myself a seed between your teeth, or a tree tapped by your reed. I dream of thorns and gardens, and I dream of tea.

My appetites, that being flooded with Garden can’t seem to sate. You, though, Red—

But your last letter… I am so good at missing things. At making myself not see. I stand at a cliff’s edge, and—hell. I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?

I sought loneliness when I was young. You’ve seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. 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 want to meet you in every place I have loved.

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.

We’re one, at least, in folly.

You gave me so much—a history, a future, a calm that lets me write these words though I’m breaking.

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

Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.

Thank you, Red. It was a hell of a ride.

Her fingernail razor blades slide through the meat of your back; she stalks you as a shadow down long lonely halls, footsteps metronome measured, inescapable.

But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.