This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

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

I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours.

Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.

Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning—poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do.

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

I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time. I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.

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 flowers from Cephalus and diamonds from Neptune, and I want to scorch the thousand earths between us to see what blooms from the ash, so we can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible only to each other. 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.

her heart breaks to see herself weeping in the world before. She wishes she could take herself into her arms, crush her in a fierce embrace.

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.