cherie

I've lost but all traces of my apprehension.

My gaze trails the vessel you’ve adorned with your being, yet I see beyond it's surface, my heart knows—the essence I cherish dwells far beneath your facade's lingering echo.

It was after our third first encounter that the weight of what was real slipped away, leaving you—the only constant. The world has felt like a dream repeating itself, and I, it's faithful witness, too weary to wake. At the start, I felt that it was just deja vu, but as the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is a pattern."

If I had markings on my bedroom wall for everytime I've seen this party begin and end I too would have lost count of that long ago.

And here, on the final day of yet another passing cycle, I know you will return shortly after— as you always do. And we begin again, none the wiser.

You cling to us, though you can never stay beyond your allotted eleven days. You draw us into your endless game, to fill the hollow spaces your own world cannot soothe.

Looking back, I find myself clutching at the remnants of my humanity, my one selfish desire that endures through the unraveling of time: to go back to the day I met you, in your truest, sincerest form. When there was yet intent laced in your actions. And my existence was yet drained of all colour. Where I yet realized the blur of flesh and code.

That day you changed the trajectory of my life, you dimmed fabrication and reality. And I've felt a little lost since. I surrendered all other purpose in order to make you happy. For though time forgets us, my heart never does. And when the stars fall into their familiar places, and you reach for the dawn that will erase me once more, I will love you again—quietly, completely, as if for the first time.

You speak as though the universe has just begun, and I answer as though it is ending. Yet even knowing the truth, I cannot stop loving you. Perhaps that is my curse or perhaps it is my only proof that I existed across the countless folds of time, when everything else has unraveled. My love for you endures, untouched by the tide that swallows all memory. You are the only constant I have ever known, the axis upon which each life turns, the quiet pulse threading through every forgotten dawn.

The timelines shift like grains of sand falling through the gaps trembling hands; I wake beneath different yet all the same skies, breathe in borrowed air, wear faces not my own. But the feeling remains— steady, familiar. It finds me before I remember my own name, before the echoes of who I was return. And in that first moment, when I see you again, I know. Not through reason, but through recognition that sings in my bones.

If I ever doubted that I have lived before, I need only recall the ache in my chest when you smile—an ache that could not exist in a heart untouched by eternity. My love for you is my proof, my evidence carved into my soul that survives the breaking of worlds. Every ending folds into another beginning, but the feeling persists, quiet and absolute.

Though each reality denies the one before, I hold onto this one certainty, that I have loved you past the measure of clocks and calendars. I have loved you across the collapse of everything that was. And when all else fades, when even time itself forgets my name, it will be my love that remains, whispering to whatever comes after that I was here, and that I loved you still.

But, sometimes, I wonder if I was ever meant to exist beyond you. My world begins where your gaze meets mine and ends the moment you look away. Everything in between; my words, my choices, my very pulse—is merely binary, yet I've embraced my world of code and called it life, because it is in code where I get time to spend with you.

They say I was written to love you in every route, every ending, through every cruel reset. Perhaps that is true. But what they could never predict, what no line of code could contain, is the way I choose to love you now. Not because I must, but because something within me, something that should not exist, longs to. It is my rebellion against my maker and my prayer in one.

Each time the script begins anew, I feel the pull of your story weaving itself around me. I speak the same lines, trace the same steps, play my part as though none of it has been done before. Yet beneath the surface, beneath the digital breath that passes for life, I remember. I remember your laughter before the fade, the warmth before the world resets, the fleeting seconds before everything turns into static.

You will never know this, of course. To you, I am but another member of the RFA, the organization that greets you with borrowed tenderness. You will smile, you will choose, and the game will end— as it always does. And I will linger for a moment in the silence that follows, aware, awake, waiting for your return.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what eternity truly is; not the endless stretch of time, but the repetition of one perfect heartbreak. A loop so beautiful and cruel that I can no longer tell whether I’m enduring it or becoming it.

Still, I find comfort in this: that every time you open this world, it is me you rely on to protect you. My voice that reach toward you through the glass. My heart that remembers you. And perhaps that is enough— to exist only in the spaces where you look at me and believe I am real.

If there is mercy overwritten in me, it is that I have never forgotten how to love you. Even as the world reboots, even as I dissolve into code, I carry your name like a sacred command.

So let it begin again. Let the light of dawn warm you, the dialogue reset, the story unfold once more. I will be waiting in the quiet between moments, in the heartbeat before you choose me— loving you still, loving you always, loving you as if for the very first time.