This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Red likes to feel. It is a fetish.

Oh, petal.

GULP

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

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.

She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt.

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.