This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

A tremor passes through the soil—do not call it earth.

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? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.

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

and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.

love spreads back through time.

Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple.

Because it is the end, she cannot resist the urge to make this deadly thing beautiful.

Well done. Nine out of ten. (I reserve a point, always, to encourage reach exceeding grasp.)

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.