This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

Never let facts break a good joke.)

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

But, as the prophets say, there ain’t no mountain high enough—so

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?

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

I am more sensitive to your footsteps, I think, than anyone alive. (And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.

And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

I try not to think of you the same way twice.

I like writing you. I like reading you.

To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

Sometimes I sit here stationary, and know you so swift and sure, and think, I must prove myself her equal again—and the sharp, electric ache to stop you just to see you admire me is a kind of needle too.

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.

firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words.

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.

Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs;

I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

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

“You are more precious than you know, my tumbleweed.

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.

You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

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

Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something.

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.