Archive of Our Own

You were a farmer's son the first time, smelled like turned earth and woodsmoke, and I did not touch you for eleven months because I did not trust my own hands.

I remember the exact angle of your wrist when you handed me a cup of water at the well. I have thought about that wrist for longer than your entire life lasted. I still think about it. I think about it while I am writing this, years later, and my hand is not steady.

You asked me once why I never ate with the others at harvest. I told you I had already eaten. I have never told a truer lie to anyone before or since.

The night I finally touched you, you went still like something that has been waiting so long for a thing it stopped believing it wanted it, and you said, "I thought you'd never", and I have not recovered from that. I don't want to recover from it. I want it lodged in me like a splinter that's gone in too deep to pull, aching on cold mornings, reminding me it happened, reminding me you were real.

You died at sixty-one, in your own bed, my hand in yours, and the last thing you said was my name like it was the only word you had left worth spending. I spent the next forty years unable to let anyone say my name at all. I made them call me something else. I couldn't bear to hear it in any other mouth.

The second one didn't trust me for a year and a half, and I loved him more for the wait.

He was sharp-tongued and suspicious and beautiful in a way that made men in the market stop mid-sentence, and he told me plainly, the second week I knew him, that he thought I was hiding something and he intended to find out what.

He was right, obviously. He always was.

I don't have much of him in writing. He burned the one letter I ever sent him, out of caution, he said, in case someone found it and misunderstood what we were to each other, in a century when that misunderstanding could have gotten us both killed. I didn't blame him. I still ache over it. It is the only letter of mine that doesn't exist anymore in any form, and some nights I try to reconstruct it word for word and I can never get past the first line, because the first line was his name.

His hands were always cold, colder than mine had any right to be by comparison, and he used to press them flat against my chest at night, just to feel that something in there still, occasionally, out of stubbornness more than biology, moved. "Proof of life", he called it. I would have let him believe anything that let him keep laughing like that.

I did not get proof of life back, in the end. I got a fever that took him in nine days, and a room that smelled like the herbs that didn't save him, and hands gone cold in a way that had nothing to do with his usual chill. I never made peace with it.

My love,

I am writing this knowing I will not give it to you. You are asleep three feet away and I am watching the candle gutter and I am so unbearably in love with you that I have to put some of it down somewhere or it will simply overflow and drown us both.

I miss you before you have even left, do you understand that? I miss the weight of your arm across me while you are still lying beside me, because some animal part of my mind has already started grieving the years I know are coming. Has already started rehearsing your absence while your pulse is still going warm and steady against my side. I am always a little bit in the future, standing at a grave that hasn't been dug yet, even while my present self is here, entirely here, drunk on the smell of your hair and the sound you make when you're almost asleep.

I don't say any of this out loud. I don't want to spend the good years teaching you to be afraid of the ending. I want you to have every uncomplicated morning you are owed.

So I will write it here instead, where you'll never read it. I will fold it small, and I will keep it in the lining of my coat against my chest, which is as close as I can get to keeping it against the place where a heart would be, if I still had ordinary use of mine.

I love you. I loved you before I knew your name this time and I will love you after I've forgotten it, because I never really forget, that's the joke of it. I remember everything and you remember nothing and somehow it still, every single time, ends the same aching way.

— M.

I will not write much about the fourth. Some griefs don't get language.

I have tried four separate times across two centuries to write this entry and every time I get as far as his name, I have to close the book.

He was gone in a night, no warning, just a night that ended wrong, and I did not get to say the last things. I have said the last things to others. I did not get to say them to him. I think that is why this entry stays empty. The others I can write because I know how they end. This one I can't, because I never got to finish it myself.

By the fifth I had grown careful in a way that disgusted me even as I did it.

I told myself I would love him less, as a kind of self-preservation, and it lasted exactly nineteen days before he caught me holding back and asked me, with a directness none of the others quite had, to at least give him something.

I gave him the whole thing.

I remember the particular texture of missing him even while he was in the next room. I would go to fetch something and find myself, thirty seconds later, turned back toward wherever he was, just to check. He used to fall asleep with his hand flat on my sternum, same as the second one had, though he never knew that. I used to lie awake under that hand for hours because I did not want to lose one second of the specific weight of it. I have hundreds of years of nights. I would trade every single one of them for ten more minutes of that particular hand on that particular night.

He got old. He got to get old, which felt, perversely, like a gift after the fourth. I got to watch his hair go grey, watch his hands get spotted and slow, watch him complain about his knees like getting old was an insult being done to him personally rather than the whole entire point, the thing I would have given anything to have.

I held that same hand, thinned and papery by then, on the night he finally didn't wake up. It found my chest one more time, out of eighty years of habit, right at the end. Proof of life. His, this time, guttering out under my palm instead of mine flickering under his.

The sixth taught me the particular ache of a touch withheld on purpose, because he was shy in a way none of the others had been, careful with his hands like he was worried they'd give away more than his mouth was ready to. It took him four months to reach for me first. I counted every one of those days. I have more patience than anyone alive or otherwise, watching him work up to something I already knew.

When he finally did reach for me, fingers laced through mine at first, I felt it in places that have no business responding to something so small. I had forgotten, a little, in the gap between him and the fifth, how loud a small touch can be after enough silence. I relearned it instantly. My whole body relearned it in half a second.

I miss his hands specifically, still, sometimes, out of all of them. The deliberate slowness of them, the way he touched things like he was asking permission from the object itself. I miss being one of the things he asked permission from. I have not been asked permission for anything in a very long time.

The seventh found me, which had never happened before. He said, the first night, that I have old eyes. I laughed it off. He didn't.

I decided, that time, to tell him enough. I thought I owed it to someone who saw me so plainly from the start. He took it not with disbelief, just with a kind of weary nod, like he'd been suspecting the shape of a much larger sky his whole life and I had only confirmed the size of it. He concluded I'd watch him go. I didn't deny it.

He made me promise not to disappear before the end. I promised. I kept it, though it cost me something I don't have a good word for.

He went slowly, over a year, and every week he asked me the same question in a different shape: was it worth it, loving something that ends? I gave him a different answer every time because I did not know. On the last day, he asked once more. I finally said yes. I don't know if it was true yet. I said it because he needed it to be, and because some part of me, running the numbers lifetimes deep, was starting to suspect I meant it.

After him I did not look for anyone. I let two decades pass with my hands empty on purpose. I told myself that was the arrangement now, that I had used up whatever right I had to keep doing this to myself, to them.

His name is Han Jisung and he makes music that don't lead anywhere yet, and I found him the way I always find them, by turning a corner I didn't mean to turn, and something in my chest that I thought had gone permanently quiet after the seventh sat up and started, humiliatingly, aching again.

I promised myself I would not write this entry the way I wrote the others—already grieving. I am trying. I am failing a little, some nights, when he falls asleep with his hand flat on my chest. Same gesture, same unknowing repetition, and I lie there cataloguing the weight of it the way I always have, because eight lifetimes of practice does not undo itself just because I want it to.
He wants to stay.

He wants to stay in the plain, terrifying, actionable sense. He has asked me questions the others never got the chance to ask, because I never let it get that far before. After all, some part of me decided long ago that offering this to someone was a cruelty rather than a gift, a thing done to a person rather than for them.

He disagrees. He has disagreed, loudly, for months now.

I keep touching him like I'm memorizing him for after, the way I always do, and he keeps catching me at it and saying, gently, that he's not going anywhere this time.

I am trying to let my hands believe it.

I miss him and he is sitting three feet away, close enough to touch, close enough that I could cross the distance in half a second and have my mouth against his temple, my hand at the back of his neck where he likes it best, and I am still, God help me, already missing him. Centuries of habit refusing to switch off just because the reason for it might, finally, after everything, be about to end.

I still reach for him the old way sometimes. That same helpless, cataloguing touch, memorizing texture and warmth like the clock has already started. He lets me, patient. But more and more, when I reach for him now, I don't feel the old ache underneath it. I just feel him. He chose it. He chose me. I have spent hundreds of years learning the specific grammar of loss and none of it, not one word of it, prepared me for what it is to sit across from someone and realize you are not, this time, going to need any of that vocabulary again.

I am putting the pen down now, the way I always do at the end of an entry. But for the first time in eight lifetimes and four hundred years, I don't feel my chest tighten at the thought of picking it back up. Because there's nothing left to grieve into these pages. There's only the small, astonishing, ordinary miracle of getting to write, tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that:

He is still here. He is still here. He is still here.

I could write that same sentence for the rest of forever and it would never once stop being the best one I know.