This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

and so it goes.

So, a roundabout way of saying: I love to eat.

To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

I like writing you. I like reading you.

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

every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us.

I want, Red—I want to give you things.

It’s mine. I am careful with what belongs to me.

Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain, Yours,

Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here.

I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.

All good stories travel from the outside in.

Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.

I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.

Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

And, to be honest, love confuses me.

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.

Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple.

My Heart’s Own Blood,

She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.

I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know.

I wish I could have shown you where I’m from, hand in hand, the world I set out to build and to protect—I don’t think you would have liked it, but I want to see it reflected in your eyes.

She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.

Coward to continue, and coward to seek an end.

but to die for madness is to die for something.

These are the thoughts that seek to betray her: cracks for roots to exploit.