A friendship between a time traveler and an immortal. Wherever the time traveler ends up, the immortal is there to catch him up to speed.
when we meet, i’m older but born after her, which is confusing. she was immortal somewhere after the 3rd century, we’re not sure. something about an ancient ritual. a sacrifice. she was twenty. if she ages, it’s nowhere i can see. the cut on her ribs from the ritual never heals. she is constantly annoyed by it.
we met in a meadow, by chance, when i got lost after woodstock. she looked at me with these odd eyes as i stumbled out of the loop, still smelling of sweat and other things. for a long time we stared at each other, she in her peasant clothes, me in tattered peace signs. and then she laughed.
she meets me in london during jack the ripper’s reign. we get tea. i tell her about the future where women are rulers and she snorts. i tell her about medicine. she tells me about witchcraft. i tell her about spaceships. she tells me about books that will die before i get to read them. when she laughs my heart feels funny. i think it’s the death on the wind.
she meets me by the berlin wall. we break it down together. she dances her bare feet in the dust. when she laughs something very small breaks in me. i miss my twenty-third birthday by accidentally going back to the dinosaurs. when i find her in the twenty-second century she’s holding a cake for me, telling me she’d found the signs of my travels somewhere back in twenty fifty-three. we sit on a rooftop and look at the stars and eat cake. i save her a slice. when i go back in time, i find her crying. i don’t tell her how i knew. there is something really beautiful in watching someone break into a smile when they’ve been sobbing.
i don’t know what happens. i stop jumping so much. we’re not supposed to. we’re not meant for long stays, we’ll change fate. just in and out. but hours turn into days. we spend a week in paris in her apartment over the city and i’m silly drunk when she leans over to me.
kissing her stops time. kissing her stops everything.
she waits for the future where we are legally allowed to be together. in the meantime i find her in dark corners. she laughs when i get tangled in my own skirts. she shows me a different world. a place where i stay. she knows i have to go. but i can’t help wish i could stay.
time isn’t real. that’s the thing. we experience it only based on our own perception of events. i only realize what’s happening because i stay too long. we are skinny dipping in a cold ocean the first time i notice it. she says something wrong. it’s not a bad mistake. but she doesn’t seem to remember how we got here for a moment. and then, in a flash, it’s gone. we are hiking through the amazon the first time she starts screaming. it’s been a long history. there’s just too much. she has periods of lucidity followed by eons of confusion. everything for her flashes by in an instant. she can’t remember what’s already been invented or what are stories i’ve told. her language is slipping.
i hold her in a future where she is shaking. i kiss her neck. she smells like summer. “i’m losing myself in it,” she whispers. her skin is still bleeding. “i’m losing it.” i don’t know what to say. infinity is a long time to wait. she experiences time in flashes, sees a hundred years at a glance. and me? i show up and evaporate before she even recognizes me.
if she is mad, i am just as bad. i travel too much to find how to stop this. into parallel universes. outside of the ages. i don’t sleep and i don’t eat and the whole time i hear her screaming.
it comes to me while i am sitting in the library of alexandria. time isn’t real. if i break the law, time could unravel. i think of her. if it’s worth it. what happens if i’m caught. we aren’t supposed to do things like this. even if we’re in love.
but i am in love. i am in love.
i open the loop. i could ruin everything. but there she is, crying on the night she will be taken. and my heart breaks. it’s simple. the only way to undo it without leading to ruin is to make sure it never happens in the first place. i take her hand and i give her my loop. she has all of time to explore now. i’ve already seen it. i take her place.
it is many years later. we meet in a meadow and she laughs.
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