Rereading it because I gave it as a gift.
On a span of blaster ground, she finds the letter.
It does not belong. Here there should be bodies mounded between the wrecks of ships that once sailed the stars. Here there should be the death and dirt and blood of a successful op. There should be moons disintegrating overhead, ships aflame in orbit.
Eating is gross, isn't it? In the abstract, I mean. Where you're used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you've known lies in a great machine's heart, it's hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit coated gums to mesh things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the red tube connecting your mouth to the set of acid under your heart.
London next - the same day, month, year, but one strand over - is the kind of London other London's dream. Sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop blow, redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story required it, all meat pies and monarchy. This is a place Blue loves and hates herself for loving.
Thank you.
For saving me, obviously, and for starters. I felt you climb down the braid. I am more sensitive to your footsteps, I think, than anyone alive. (And everyone is alive somewhere in time. Even these digressions feel weak. I like them usually, my jokes. They feel like tacking in, not out, to the matter at home. Less so now.) I followed you. I apologize for that, for trespassing on your privacy, as you make yourself what you had to be to win.
I like writing you. I like reading you. When I finish your letters, I spend frantic hours in secret composing my replies, pondering ways to send them.
She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. 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 in all the strands, it will be to you.
