And then one day you looked at me and said you couldn't see me anymore.
Do you remember that, Rose? Your hair still damp from the shower and your words caught slurred on your toothbrush; it's like I'm looking at you through a mirror, and I don't even know if you are you anymore. Because things aren't easily fixed; words don't fill the gaps left by loss and hastily built dreams will always be nothing more than shadows upon waking.
(You said you talk and talk and talk as if it will fix you, as if it will fix us.)
I am sitting in Prague and you, you are so far away.
Hopefully,
yours
She wakes and forgets herself, lets those dying gasps of memory drift back into the hidden corners of her mind, curled into themselves as she begins another day. Gathering her hair at her nape, scraping cereal from the bottom of her bowl, sprinting through winding traffic on the walk to work.
Pete brings her donuts and lukewarm coffee, leans across the wall partitioning her office area, and says, "I can't cover for you forever."
"I know," she replies, and the words are drifting, drifting, uncontrollable. "I never asked you too, though, did I?"
You told me I don't recognize anyone in this place. I know their histories, I have memories of them, I can give you lists of things that drove me mad about them, but I don't know them. As if everything around you is a shade, a projection of that perfect person locked away in your darkest dreams, screaming for their freedom while you try to grasp at some reminder of life before this.
I have lists of numbers and words and names and smells of everyone I knew, I loved, I was thrown into. My mother who spoke of time and the vortex and the ancient house of Lungbarrow over chipped cups of tea during commercial breaks. My father, who always died, a final sigh of breath marking his place in the universe. Loves and companions and enemies (but that was just another way of saying I love you, please don't leave me here alone, planets and tangled streets and the ghosts of cities I'd never even dreamed of.
I dream of myself, of him sometimes, still unused to the need this body of mine has for slumber, jerking awake in a nameless room filled with the sounds of others' breathing. And there is a brief slice of time I cannot control, a second in which I am falling and screaming with this nameless fear because I can't even recognize myself anymore, can't understand this ache that curls itself in that empty space in my chest that once beat with longing and joy and more, and oh Rose, you've felt that haven't you? The collapse of gravity around you, the world tilting topsy-turvy about you and it's so easy to fix, so easy to right but you can't remember how.
I am in Berlin. An apt place to rewrite my history, to unravel these things that led me away from you.
Hopefully,
yours
During a lunch break on a dreary Tuesday she wanders to the closest used bookshop and trails soft fingers over the spines of books, ingraining their imperfections on her skin. And then on a sagging shelf in a corner there is one with a cracked spine and peeling letters and she pulls it from the shelf out a sense of duty, a need to take it home and make it feel remembered again.
The past is a foreign country, she reads, and stops, distracted by the ringing of her mobile; another emergency at Torchwood. The line lingers, carried underneath her ribs as she moves through the hours and days that follow that small moment.
The line lingers and is read in his voice, written in his hand, and well, she's traveled across time and space for him, because of him. Perhaps that's all this is, when it is finally laid bare.
A new adventure.
If the past is a foreign country then what is the future? Let's continue the overblown sentiment: an unnamed street, an empty city, waiting to be filled with us, with our petty hates and loves and Eastenders reruns and cheap tea packets. But then, thinking about that, about how quiet that place would be with just the two of us (because I need you Rose, to smile at me and build those darkened alleys, ancient churches, cheap chipshops from your memories, from your wishes) with nothing but us to fill that place and make it whole-
Is that what it is to be human, Rose?
To wake and know you will never accomplish that, to know there will always be some small unfilled emptiness and live despite it, move away from it and tell yourself it is not true, it is not reality, that what matters is this noise and chaos and now? To accept that there will always be gaps left to be filed?
You thought I needed you to fill those spaces, that I loved you because I was pushed towards it out of fear and loss and desperation, marking you as my constant in an everchanging world.
Here is a secret: I loved you (still love you, will always love you with these half-mad grins of mine and my so human frail heart) because of those spaces, despite them.
I have to watch the clock now or time simply slips away from me. Another snippet of myself lost and forgotten on a beach, but there is a sort of animal comfort in looking at a clock and watching the hands of it continue moving forwards, marking down time, connecting me to the rest of these travelers.
My train arrives in a few minutes, as good an ending point as any other.
Hopefully,
yours
She jumbles the beginnings and endings; was it when she took his hand while her planet ended, or when he left her for another girl with stars in her eyes, or when she turned to him and said they needed a break and his face crumpled so, or now or then orwheneverdoesitevenmatter.
Her mobile vibrates, making her jump slightly, and she tugs it from her front pocket one-handed to flip it open. Waits as the message is downloaded and then opens to show the back of a woman huddled into a scarlet coat, hair tangled in messy braids, scuffed trainers just crossing the safety line near the edge of a platform.
She turns then and sees his familiar form peering at her from a distance, a blur of brown hair and slouchy jacket and him, just him and her lungs are burning and she's probably making a fool of herself but it doesn't matter, it will never matter.
"I see there's no massive secret government team here to arrest me for entering the U.K. as an illegal half-alien hybrid, so that's good," he jokes, his duffel bag bumping her arms as she throws herself into his open arms.
"Ugh, you're so unbelievably romantic, did you know?" she laughs, and presses her mouth against his.
Here's us, simply and impossibly. -yours