This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

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

I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel—to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.

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

Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them.

I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them,

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 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.

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’ll—

Listen to me—I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.

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.

I have been made a weapon, and they have plunged me into your heart.

The needle sinks and spirals through its grooves. I spurt anachronisms as I wind down. It’s good to feel this in common with the universe, somehow.

For Commandant, art is a curiosity, a detour on the journey to pure math.

suppose that we defected, not to each other’s sides, but to each other?

Shall we build a bridge between our Shifts and hold it—a space in which to be neighbours, to keep dogs, share tea?

I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.