Fate,

Longer ago than it seems, I was a fresh-faced young actress in a traveling theater troupe. I loved my work, and I loved the places, opportunities, and friends it brought me.

Eventually, I came to love the troupe’s gorgeous, charming, intelligent, funny, and did I mention gorgeous new director, and I mean REALLY love him. Our betrothal was a celebration for all in our company as well as all who dwelled or were fellow visitors to the city in which our engagement took place.

A blue-haired woman with lines in her face as deep as her mouth and pupils laid a hand on my shoulder as the party was winding down. She gushed about what a lovely couple my fiance and I made, and while she knew I would miss my days of performing, traveling, and socializing, she also knew how much I would love the home I would keep for my husband and the babies I would raise while he supported us, for she had made a similar sacrifice decades before.

I was, naturally, horrified. So horrified that I dropped my half-finished ale on the ground and fled the party for the nearby woods. I do not know how long it was between when the sun set and when the full moon rose above the surrounding trees, but that is when I, with the day’s food and drink wearing off and awareness of my situation sinking in, stumbled across a root and into a tiny clearing that hosted nothing more than a cabin so small and ramshackle it was really more of a shack and a kettle steaming and hissing over a glowing stone pit just outside the structure’s front door.

A woman was hunched over the kettle, stirring its contents, and when she straightened and turned to greet me, I saw it was the same woman who had literally gripped me at my party. “I knew you’d come,” she stated matter-of-factly.

The deal she proposed was thus: I would have the age of the universe to continue my craft, and then, once I felt I had mastered it all, to try my hand at writing and directing my own plays (as I had always wanted), then perhaps analyzing the collected works of all of theater in an academic setting (as had also appealed to me, though would have been nigh impossible for a woman to do so in any serious manner at the time), then any and all other pursuits that suited my fancy, and unlike the woman who was already of an age when she began her own current studies, my youth (or the appearance thereof) would remain with me, as would my betrothed’s, if he wished the same. The catch: She needed a set of working human reproductive organs for a formula she was testing, and they would need to be mine.

She barely had time to finish her proposal before I agreed to it. What was there to disagree with? An eternity or as close as one could come to it to explore the world and hone my passions, all while looking upon the breathtaking face of my beloved for as long as the sun should rise, and no needy, whinging, stinking brats to get in our way!

The full moon readily lit my path back to the city, where the party had dwindled. I answered my lover’s cry of relief and subsequent scolding with an exuberant explanation of all the opportunities that now lay before us. His face, his exquisite face, crumbled as I spoke.

“Our life now, the theater and the travel, they satisfy me,” my love responded once I had finished. “But they do not bring me meaning. Only when I have a home filled with the laughter of my children will I find that.”

It was not the end of our association, for even after he and his pregnant bride settled in the village where our troupe originated, he continued to write and direct new plays that were quick to gain wide recognition, in no small part due to the masterful combination of aching wisdom and wide-eyed innocence of the company’s lead actress. He mentored me as I began to write and direct my own works and celebrated, he and his wife and their children and eventual grandchildren, when I became an internationally renowned playwright myself (even if it was under a pen name, for such was the plight of women creators at the time).

His children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. all continued to encourage me after he died and his memory became too painful for me to carry around the stage and took to the hallowed halls of academia instead. I visit our home village, now a city in its own right, and tell his great-great-great…grandchildren what a wondrous man their ancestor was and how grateful I was to know him, even though I now live in the woods outside the city of our short betrothal in a small and ramshackle cabin next door to my new mentor. Even with all the years of devotion to my original craft, the look on their faces tells me that I cannot completely eradicate the sadness from my voice when I talk about the only man I have ever and will ever love.

I know you can no more change the past than I can, Fate, nor do I believe I would wish for you to do so, but what I do desire to know is this: why must each succeeding generation of my beloved’s descendants, no matter how far removed, be the exact replica of him, feature for feature?

You did say you wanted to look upon your beloved’s face for as long as the sun should rise, whether or not it was attached to him, did you not?

***