— ask meme : THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, MAX GLADSTONE & AMAL EL-MOHTAR. pronouns / tenses changed in some places.
twice is coincidence. three times is enemy action.
killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. having killed never does.
you know — just as i’ve known, since our eyes met — that we have unfinished business.
it’s been so long since i last started a new conversation.
we knew one another as one knows a childhood dream.
our glorious crystal future shines so bright i gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.
i’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light i tried to step.
it grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player. but then i imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.
let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: you could have killed me, but didn’t.
tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.
there’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?
do i have you still? do i address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass?
if we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain each other.
that’s what we treasure. that’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.
hunger, ___ — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know?
have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? sometimes i think that’s what i have instead of friends.
this is a place i love, and hate myself for loving.
i was the only person on that tiny rock, and i made the world go dark.
i wanted to be seen. that need dug into the heart of me.
i was light, hollowed, hungry.
you place each stone expecting it may do many things. a confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.
i have observed friendship as one observes high holy days.
harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, and we grow stronger and more potent together.
what i return to, the me-ness that i know as pure, inescapable self... is hunger.
i love cities. to be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what i see and what i am.
shit. i’m sorry. i can’t keep up the joke. and it’s wrong to call you enemy.
i am more sensitive to your footsteps, i think, than anyone alive.
this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.
i see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. i try not to think of you the same way twice.
i have built a you within me, or you have. i wonder what of me there is in you.
you’ve whetted me like a stone.
i remember bright light, and then — hunger. hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing.
i was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream.
this feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me. but i trust you.
there was, i am sure, a time i did not know you. or did i dream that me, as i’ve so often dreamed of you?
i want to be a body for you.
i sought loneliness when i was young. but when i think of you, i want to be alone together.
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.
this is me, the truth of me: broken open, in the palm of your hand, dying.
you must feel it — the difference? we’re on the brink of something.
i would rather break the world than lose you.
i’ll be all the poets. i’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written it will be to you.
how could you die like this? how could you die at all?
sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.
