Despite the self-enforced distance, you think of her. In your quieter moments, between cleaning up messes in the past, between arranging everything that was already arranged when you got there the first time, between feeling the world spiral out from between your fingers as you lay on cool kitchen tiles. When you reach for the memories, they’re there. They’re always there. You hate yourself for reaching, and you hate yourself more for the relief it brings you.
You aren’t blind or stupid or as oblivious as you’d like other people to think, sometimes. In your memories, you can see the way she looks at you. You can see that your love isn’t- wasn’t, you remind yourself, wasn’t, past tense -one-sided. You may have pretended to look away when her eyes went soft around the edges, but you have so much more time to work with as compared to normal people, and no one to stop you from taking her in when the second hand had stopped ticking.
If you had been any less pressed for time, you could’ve had her. Maybe she would’ve made the offer herself, or accepted your request. If you were brave enough, you could’ve had her for however long of a time she’d relent to being yours. You don’t know if it would have worked. You don’t know if it would have lasted. You will never know, and you will take that not-knowing down into your grave.
You, Lark Athlai, are a coward.
You should be ashamed to wear your own face, and, in truth, you are. Your mind is fracturing apart under the stress. Your hands shake, now, when you aren’t holding them still or focusing them on a task. Old damage and old exhaustion and old terror mixing up cocktails in your nerve endings. Every emotion you have wears you thin, tires you out, feels like an old dollar store Halloween mask you’re putting on. You are preparing for your grand debut in the play that is “Lark Athlai Fucking Dies And No One Gives A Shit. The World Keeps Turning. The Timeline Marches On.”
It’s a working title. LAFDANOGAS-TWKT-TTMO is a hell of an acronym. It isn’t easy on the eyes. Neither are you, these days.
It is also not strictly true. The title, you mean. You’ve made friends along your travels, because you were lonely and they were there and you would’ve started falling apart a lot sooner without the company. Most of those friends will have abandoned you by now, or stopped thinking about you, or be otherwise unable to reach you by virtue of time travel being a hell of a getaway car, but Lily… she’s stubborn. You did always like that in a- well, in anything other than yourself.
It gets harder to deny your feelings every day. The love builds up inside of you with nowhere to go until you finally reach a point where the switch flips and it’s easy to claim that too much time has passed for you to go crawling back to her.
It turns out that the love likes to escape as tears, and you let yourself cry until you feel like you could float away on the breeze. Until you’re wrung out and dry, somewhere beyond exhausted and beyond sad, like your grief is tired of being contained in a human-shaped package.
Maybe you are also tired of being contained in a human-shaped package. Maybe it will be a relief, to die. To be at peace for once.
You have to tell yourself that, or you’ll lay down and stop before you’ve done all you need to do. Sometimes you wish you were blind and stupid and oblivious. It might make things easier.