This is How You Lose the Time War

I am so weak.

Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs; I’ll—

Garden seems to like roots, and this book roots in rootlessness. Are you a tumbleweed, then? A dandelion seed?

Take these years of mine, take these seeds, and let them grow me something similar in reply? I miss the length of your letters.

And yet you’re still here. Aren’t you. Immune to my ruses, Indigo. I hoped you would leave and save yourself. But you remain. I think I would too. I hope I would be that brave, if you are. That we each would give up as much to read the other’s last few lines, written in water and forever.

I want to say, now, before you can beat me to it—Red, when I think of this seed in your mouth I imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips.

I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?

You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.

My memories of you spread through millennia, and each highlights you in motion.

Dear Red Sky at Morning, Don’t shorten your letters.

As I went to write that, though, I saw you shaking your head. You were right, back when—I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

I ramble, it seems, when writing to the darkness by hand. How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give you: this first, for me.

I confess I don’t entirely know what’s meaningful to you. I fall back on assumptions: seeds and grass, growing things. It verges on stereotype. And when you write me, you write in furnace and in flame.

Let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: You could have killed me, but didn’t.

I prefer read-receipts, all things considered—the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires. But this is a fascinating technology, in its limits.

Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away.

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.