This Is How You Lose the Time War

You wonder how each moment bled into the next and created the days, months, and years that now all feel like seconds? That’s how I feel. Right now. In this moment. It feels like our entire past together spans eons and the time I’ve spent without him is an insignificant little flash. I have loved Jesse since the day I saw him at that swim meet.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.

Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parenthe

The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer.