Time Is the Place That Takes You

In the timeline where the water takes you

2004.

We’re eating breakfast in our bungalow. I ask you about the moth, and your eyes instantly light up, just like they did last night when you were holding the atlas moth in your hands. But you turn instantly serious.

“Poor bees, save the bees, bee the change. But I say fuck the bees. Do you know what will happen if moths go extinct? Ethan, are you listening?”

Of course I’m listening, moon of my life. But before moths go extinct, humans will go extinct first. And then it will all start over again.

You ask what I mean by living in different timelines. I want to tell you there’s nothing special in me; the past and future are illusions from the human brain. To me, it’s just a physical dimension, I was born this way. But I don’t tell you how this timeline ends. I don’t tell you about the tsunami, how I’ll reach for your hand and miss.

In the timeline where the glass takes you

2055.

We’re in Berlin. You’re wearing one of those new shimmering dresses.

“I moved here three days ago. Berlin’s the only city with clubs that ban these shitty brainplants.”

Your eyes are introspective, almost bored on this dancefloor that smells of breath and beer.

Moths circle the neon sign outside the club.

“Did you know moths navigate by moonlight? Artificial lights fuck them up. They think they’re following the moon.”

For a moment, my heart misses a beat because I know what’s ahead. We will talk all night and morning. We will kiss at dawn at Oberbaum Bridge, and I’ll be surprised by how soft your lips are.

But I won’t tell you anything about the grey car and the drunk driver. I can’t tell you about the glass, how your lifeless hands will rest in your own blood. I don’t tell you I could’ve prevented this, but the price would’ve been to never see you again.

In the timeline where your body takes you

2476.

“Are you an alien or a human?”

Your nose is bleeding in the space elevator. You’re aware of the microsecond my eyes lay on you, and instinctively remove the blood with your knuckle, with the same nonchalance of removing a hair from the sweater. “Both,” I say. Or neither. We’re going up to the Moon, our Moon, the one I promised in the timeline where the fever takes you.

And you seem to be content with the answer, because in all timelines, nothing surprises you, except when you learned that atlas moths don’t have mouths, but they survive for only a few weeks with fat reserves stored when they were caterpillars. Moths devote their whole life to mating.

“I’m not dead, yet, you know?”

I must not tell you how radiation will take you. How your own blood will stop working, how I’ll still cling to your hands as the heat goes away.

In the timeline where the light takes you

3125.

I am so tired.

That’s the thing I can’t tell you, the thing underneath all other things I can’t tell you. I am tired of holding your hand at the end of every story. Because if I tell you, the timeline decoheres, and I lose forever the thread that leads me back to you.

And I look at you in your moth shirt, with its stupid joke—Got a Light?—and I think, I can’t do this anymore.

I close my eyes as I watch your skin dematerialize from the light bomb, as I watch you bleeding to death, as I’m holding your still hand because the plague took you away. And tears come to me as every last time, as every first time, when the currents pulled you away from me, and I sob as in all the timelines when we never met.

“Hey, what’s going on, my moon?” You take my face in your hands.

And then I do. I tell you everything. The water, the glass, the fever, the radiation. The price of warning you, which is never finding you again. The choice I’ve made, every time, to let you die so I could keep you.

For a long moment, you don’t speak, and you don’t look at me.

“You let me die.” Your voice is flat. “So you could fuck my next incarnation?”

“No, no! Because I couldn’t lose you—”

“You used me. In all timelines.” You step back. Your hand, which I was reaching for, stays at your side.

“I think you should leave now,” you say.

And so I do, for the first time. From now on, I don’t know how this timeline ends anymore. I’m terrified. For the first time in my life, time is now a dark place from which I can no longer escape—except by moving forward, inexorably. And now you, moon of my life, are part of the past. I can never go back.

Time is the place that takes me away from you.

Outside, a moth is trapped around a streetlamp, mistaking it for its moon.

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