A/N: Written for Diamond.
You will fall in love with someone who is perpetually leaving you.
This is the predicament, the essential conundrum of you and her, which has never in centuries befallen your heart to such an extent.
It's not as if you don't leave her first. You've set two lives—maybe three or four—afire with your sloppy impacts, cut wildly into the grain of a couple's banality with your blue box knife. They are less mundane for all the interference, but not happier or safer.
If only you might have known and prevented the instigating departure, there could have been a moment where you'd grasp her, plead, stop the boulder rolling down the hill. You are a cosmic Sisyphus to keep running to her like you do and perhaps you belong in purgatory after all; Sisyphus's stone didn't have a husband.
When you walk down the aisle to be married, your breathing halts, caught in the apex of your throat between misunderstanding and fear. You are meant to recall something and if you could recall it now, you feel as though you might be saved from the confusion meshed around your mind and the centrifugal force that sends you stepping toward the altar, one echoing footfall after another. If you can't breath you can't speak but you think with fevered incoherence: too young, too young.
Don't know, don't know.
Hazy recollection tickles the fringe of your thoughts but is smothered by the fear, a gap-toothed grinning monster with your hair, because you always did do that—ruin yourself.
Here you are too proud to admit you do not know what it is you want. Here you've arrived believing weakness to be a sin, because as someone will tell you during another far-off tragedy, don't show the damage. Here is a man who loves you; where is the man who won't?
Is he fair or dark? Is he kind, funny? Why is he so important, and why have you never felt a desire so urgent as your compulsion to remember him?
The realization shocks you, and too late. You and he are never able to get the hang of punctuality.
You cry silent tears when you say, "I do."
"She's so happy," says her mother, the mother she must know, should know. "What a beautiful bride."
You left her mind, too, you stupid bloody idiot.
The psychiatrists prey on you from a young age. Every doctor wants to be the one to fix you so you'll stop believing what you say.
When you are eleven you grow tired of being taunted on the playground. You grow tired of being called "a problem child," of being sent to the headmistress for protesting with your fists, of your aunt's clucking tongue when you scream I'm not a liar.
And then you lie. One doctor publishes an article about you in a medical journal. "Cured," he says. "After four years of therapy. A testament to the power of modern psychiatry." He is your fourth and last psychiatrist, for a while.
As a teenager you attend one meeting of the Extraterrestrial Survivors Society, a group of men and women who claim to have had similar experiences to yours. These people are worse than liars; they are daft. It is your final attempt to make anyone understand.
Even Rory's belief is an empty trophy, clearly dusted together with faith and scraps of his love for you. Maybe he even believes to appease you—you wouldn't put it past him. This is Rory's forte: appeasement.
She is always edging away from you, sometimes by degrees, sometimes in leaps and bounds.
You may leave her, but it's not perpetual. If anything you're running to and fro, getting as close as you dare and then ripping yourself away. But you always come back.
She never retraces her path away from you. With the others you've been the leader and they've followed after, but you trail behind Amy, forcing yourself a niche in her heart because she's imprinted so irreversibly on yours. Even your attempts to push her away become tests of her love for you. You care nothing about the distinctions between platonic love and otherwise; the swirling bond you share with her transcends any talk of who fancies whom. This version of you, the youngest oldest man in the universe, throws sun-sized tantrums at the hint of the thought of losing Amy Pond. I wanted to be adored.
"I'll be with him like I should be," says Amy.
You are not a wife, you want to tell her. You are magnificent. You are a star; you are a galaxy. You are the terrific beauty of the cosmos and the small wonder of a good painting. You are strength and fragility, damage and cure. You are extraordinary. You couldn't live without me. Please, you might beg, do not be ordinary.
"Stop it," you cry. "Just stop it."
If you could have got it all out, all the poetry of your devotion and your need, she might have stayed. You preoccupy yourself with this unlikely possibility for months afterwards, a fantasy of the improbable.
The second time he leaves, when you're nearly well and grown, you're bereft of hope. After he raised you back to optimism for twenty minutes, the void of your garden is a black hole, and the sucking silence of him not arriving reopens your oldest scars. All your nerves are exposed to the unfriendly air.
The next two years of your life offer no compensation and no exit. You patch yourself back together again, your wounds layered and showing gradients of age. When you're offered a forever, you take it, because you let go of the one that fueled your childhood's belligerent imagination. You had to. You couldn't bear to look a fool, empty-handed and proven wrong.
In the future your body will be dying for the eleventh time.
With arms increasingly heavy, you will pilot your ship to a place she remembers well. She'll land like a key fitting its homey lock, meant to be. The pinwheel will click and the swing set will creak and you'll destroy the shed, again. As a familiar golden wash sparks across your skin, you'll fall to your knees in her garden and pound your fists into the grass. Though you won't know the year or if she even lives here now, you will scream Amelia Pond's name into the brusque night.
You will come here because you want the first face this face saw to be the last one it sees, too. You will come seeking circularity, because if you return to the beginning perhaps it won't feel like an ending.
You will still hate endings.
(We all do.)
You did not lie in the afterward.
You embellished; there's a difference; you're a writer, you know the truth of these things.
It'd be better, you decided, if he didn't know that you're developing claustrophobia and nowhere you travel in the world is ever far enough to cure it. It'd be better if he didn't know that books are your escape as much as your profession or art. You have no other way to reach him and the times you had together.
It'd be better if he didn't know you regret what you did; it'd be better if you didn't know that either.
You are, and have always been, too strong to tell him, but your conception of strength has been mangled since you were a child and did what you had to do to survive a life without the universe. Now you're back at that point and making all the same excuses.
The issue you two ran into had everything to do with fear. You were scared of one another's ultimate refusals, scared of rejection delivered in the battered package of friendship, scared of dying too soon and living too long. For being the two most impulsive creatures in the universe, you refused to live with one another in the moment. You refused to forget tomorrow and yesterday and just be together, and you could have done it—been together—what with the hugeness of the love between you. Granted, this life would not have been free of its difficulties. Neither of you was without temper, without prejudice, without insecurity.
But you had survived a big bang, the dissolution of history, the return of ancient monsters and the advent of new ones, the loss of a child and countless loved ones.
You could have stood the arguments. Now you'd give anything for one last fight.