This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

The thought that you could have trapped me (stranded me, perhaps? Oh dear, sorry-not-sorry) is so delicious that I confess myself quite overcome.

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

I wanted to be seen. That need dug into the heart of me. It felt good.

Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay’s shriek. She collects blues and keeps them.

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

have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

My dear Sugar Maple, We’re tapping the trees, boiling sap down for syrup and hard candy. I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.

But if you hunger, I swell. You have me watching birds, and though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.

You wish you could hold me at knifepoint again. You do, still, in a way. So long as I bear these last three seeds in a hollow behind my eye, you are a blade against my back. I love the danger of it.

And in your absence you are deadly as a blade.

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.

You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. 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 say, now, before you can beat me to it—Red, when I think of this seed in your mouth I imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips.

Do you laugh, sea foam? Do you smile, ice, and observe your triumph with an angel’s remove? Sapphire-flamed phoenix, risen, do you command me once again to look upon your works and despair?

I remember hunting you through Samarkand, thrilling to think I might touch the loosening strands of your hair. 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 dance—this will be a very boring letter—because this thing in me, this piping heat, this rising sun that hardly fits in the sky of me won’t stay put. To know you my equal in this, too—this beat of my blood’s drum, this feast that won’t diminish no matter how I ravage it—Red. Red, Red, Red, I want to write you poetry,

I would rather break the world than lose you.

I loved you. That was true. With what’s left of me I can’t help but love you still. This is how you win, Red: a long game, a subtle hand played well. You played me like a symphony, and I hope you won’t mind my feeling a little proud of you for such a magnificent betrayal.