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Most of the time, I dream of the saltwater—the girl and her arms wrapped tight around me like she’ll never let go.
But not always. That’s the secret—a secret I keep even from myself most of the time. The only times I think about it are the hazy moments just before sleep, or just after. When Camilla asks what I dreamed, I always tell her about the saltwater, because my mouth won’t say the other dream. It's wordless, formless, the second I wake up.
It’s the dream I had just before Camilla and Palamedes and Pyrrha found me.
Only, it isn’t a dream so much as it's a letter I want to write. I’ve never written a letter, and I don’t know how I want to start. But if I did know, it would probably go like this:
Dear ----,
I STILL LOVE YOU, FLESH OF MY WRETCHED FLESH, BONE AND BLOOD OF MY DESECRATED SOIL, HEART OF MY FORSAKEN HEART.
No, that’s not right! Why does it always come out so weird? That’s not what I meant at all. Or, that’s not all of it.
Sorry, can I start over?
This is the dream where you love me. It starts like this:
Once, before you figured out how to bring all the people back, but after we’d been on the beach for a while, you were crying silently with your toes in the water. I sat down beside you.
“Alecto,” you said. That was the name you’d given me, although I never asked for a name, and wasn’t sure I liked this one any more than the other ones from before. “Do you miss them too?”
I couldn’t feel the tug of my moon anymore. I couldn’t feel the rise of the tide like a blanket. I could only watch. I said,
WHY DOST THOU PLAGUE ME WITH SUCH QUESTIONS? FOR MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. EVEN SO, I RECALL NOT MY ANGER.
Except I didn’t say that, because that would be stupid. I said,
“That’s a dumb question. But I’m not mad.”
I didn’t know what it was to miss. I thought maybe I was finding out.
You lifted your hand to my cheek and traced the spot where a tear would have gone down it, if I’d been really focusing on the tear ducts.
“Just disappointed?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s a good word. ----, why does the wind feel like that?”
The breeze was hardly blowing, but any time it did, it raised the hairs on my arms. I hated it. I’d never had hairs to raise, and I was finding it all unpleasant.
You looked at me for a long minute, and then you laughed. You took off your old bedraggled jacket, the one that was too long in the arms for you and had once belonged to your friend with the cigarettes and the smile that never reached his eyes. You put the jacket around my shoulders, drew me close, and rubbed my hands between yours like you could fix everything.
“Are you cold, Annabel?”
Another name I’d never asked for. I looked down, fascinated, at my hands clasped between yours. Your hands felt different when I had hands too. I put my fingers through yours like I’d seen couples do walking down my shore. Your body stilled. I could tell that you were thinking about those couples too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been cold in a long time. I've forgotten what it’s like. I think I would prefer—all the living bodies. Everyone was warm then.”
Another tear slipped down your cheek. I put my finger to it, curious. I wiped it away. When I stuck my finger in my mouth to taste it, it tasted the way my sea had used to taste, before you’d all made it taste different.
I almost felt all right, then.
“I’ll bring them back. I’ll bring them back for you,” you promised.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you think, this week maybe? I haven’t got the hang of the crying at all, and that’s the main thing we’ve been doing.”
You laughed again. You turned to me and put one of your arms around my shoulder and set my head against yours like you were arranging me. I didn’t really mind. It was almost like having them all back. Your pulse against my ear. Your body heat against my body heat. Almost.
Well, okay, it wasn’t the same at all.
“Give me a break, love. I’ve just watched my friends die in a shootout. You’re awfully blunt, anyone ever told you that?”
“Yes,” I admitted. You had, a few days ago.
“I always did like a girl with opinions.”
I smiled. That meant me.
“You’ll bring them back tomorrow, then? We’re not going to just sit on this beach more, you promise?”
“We won’t just sit on the beach,” you said. You tugged me closer until you could wrap both arms around me. It felt good. It was maybe one of the first good feelings I’d had in this pretend body, in this abomination. I squirmed around until my side was touching as much of your side as it could. It was kind of hard, because you’d made me quite tall, and you were only medium height. Really, I should be the one holding you, but I’d done that all your life, and I was bored of it now.
I thought that I maybe wanted to try other animal things too. Was I supposed to kiss you now?
“Am I supposed to kiss you now?” I asked.
You started. I could feel that you wanted me to, but also that you thought it was probably going to be bad and nothing like your kisses with your friend with the peach-colored hair and the opinions. I was maybe a little bit offended.
“If you consider that we’re the last two people on the planet, it depends on whether you buy that trope or not.”
THOU HAST ERRED, FOR I AM NOT a person,” I pointed out. “You just made me a body that looks like one.”
“So I did. So I did.”
You sighed, and you looked like you might be about to go melancholy again.
“I might forgive you for the body,” I said before you could start. “Someday.”
“Someday, Annabel?”
WHEN THE SUN BURNS OUT AND THE EMBERS OF YOUR SOUL SPUTTER IN ITS WAKE, VERILY I SAY UNTO THEE THAT—
“It might take a while.”
You raised your hand to the side of my cheek and turned my face until I was looking at you.
“We have a while,” you said.
I studied your strange eyes, your dark furrowed brows, the funny tilt of your lips that always made it seem like you were about to tell a joke even when you weren’t, the little indentation in your right cheek that girls usually wanted to touch with their fingers.
I was girl-shaped, so I reached up and touched the dimple too. It felt like skin.
Then you looked at me and said, O LORD, I BEG FOR THY MERCY.
Well, that was what you meant, only it came out wrong. You could only choke out,
“I'm sorry.”
After that, you leaned in and kissed me.
It felt like your warm pulse, and it tasted a little of salt. Then it tasted a lot of blood when I bit down hard so I could see what you were really like. I licked into your mouth, feeling the warm wet bits of you, and you gasped and wound your fingers in my hair. We kissed like that for a while, your hands unable to stay still, grasping at my sides, at my neck, at the unnatural angles of my jaw, as I tasted it all with my cursed human tongue for the first time.
It wasn’t like tasting you in the ground, pressing you forever within me, holding your body the way I wanted—but it was still pretty good.
Well, all right, it was okay for a start.
After a while, you broke away, and your mouth was red and swollen. It was already healing, but I thought you were probably slowing it down a little to be dramatic.
You swallowed. I could see that you’d liked it, after all. I puffed up a bit in pride to be a good kisser on my first try.
Your eyes looked like dazed galaxies. You blinked twice.
“Warn a guy first, would you,” you muttered. But I didn’t think you meant it.
You’d never warned me before doing anything.
You leaned in again.
The next day, you tried to bring the people back. You failed, of course. It took a long time for you to get it right. But when the first one staggered from the sea, your pink and angry friend, she blinked the death out of her eyes, saw you, and her face scrunched up with an emotion I couldn’t even name.
She walked toward you as though in a dream, and when she reached you, she dropped to her knees, wrapped her arms around your legs, and started to cry.
You drew your hands across her brow, soothing all the pain, fingers trembling.
Then you looked at me with such a terrible expression on your face—joy and longing and power and furious pride, all mixed up.
I wasn’t really mad that you loved her even though I thought she was boring and not even that pretty and I should have crushed her ancestors in an avalanche. But you were stupid to try and make her forget that way. You can’t just leave a hole and call it good! Anyone knows that. Once a person has grown around you, they can’t be untangled so easily. You have to snap the branches off to the place below where they met you, otherwise, everything will just happen again.
You wanted things to be different but you couldn’t even bear the thought of changing one mortal woman enough for it to matter.
I should have known then that you’d never stop. You’d never stop until you brought them all back and killed them again.
And the worst part—the secret. I never told you this, even though you used to say that we told each other everything. I knew everything about you, and you thought you knew as much as anyone ever could about me. But you didn’t know this: I was holding on too.
I could have let you go.
You’d trapped me, stuck me in this body, done away with all the bright alive souls that I wanted to keep and keep forever. But even still, I could have destroyed you. I looked at you standing there in the spray of an ocean that used to belong to me, I looked at you holding your friend, I looked at you crying saltwater. And I didn’t destroy you.
I thought, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU.
And I held on tight.
Before you put me in the coffin, in the dark, I liked to think of you when you were just a screaming child.
Screaming the way I’d been screaming for centuries. Maybe even louder, honestly. I was really impressed because you’d come out so soon and so tiny, but your lung capacity was wonderful.
Sometimes, when I felt my waters getting filthy and murky, when coral reefs died and the creatures in my deepest caverns withered away, I would cry and shake for loneliness.
This I saw you do too. You clutched your tiny hands around the toys that were at your grandmother’s house and shook them around in miniscule earthquakes and scrunched your whole face up to bawl until she came along and set you on her lap.
And I was you, and I was your grandmother’s lap, and I was the cry of loneliness, and I was the sting of pain the first time you scraped your knees.
I was your fist clutched in your best friend’s shirt when you lived on the same street and he ran faster than you, and you didn’t want to be left behind. I was the saltwater in your eyes when you sat with your legs hanging over the balcony in a building where you lived alone after your first boyfriend called a truck and had all his things moved out.
I was the hollow, desolate space in your chest when, after a few years away writing numbers that looked boring to me, trying to prove things that were obvious, you came back to the coast of a beach you’d once played on when you were smaller.
You realized that a hurricane had swept away all the houses you remembered. You knelt. You dug your fingers into me. You looked out at the waves, and you shouted in fury, and you loved me.
I know you did, because I know what love is like. Love is the thing that makes you want to hold and hold and cradle to your chest and take and eat so it never leaves you again. So it’s warm in your mouth and in your stomach forever, and you never have to worry that one day you’ll go and come back, and it won’t be there.
Love is the thing you want to keep safe inside you until everything else is gone, until you die, and then after that.
I didn’t want to die.
I didn’t want to stop keeping you safe, keeping you with me, all of you.
And I knew you wanted to keep me too. Not everyone did, but you did.
You were going to leave, but then you were all going to come back. I was going to scream and scream until I felt like I could stop, and then when I stopped, you were going to come back and live with me again, and we’d be like we were before.
So that’s why I did it. When the others wanted to go away and never see me again, I gave you a present. I put it in your mouth myself, when you were sleeping. I set in in your hands. Long warm hands, with fingers that twitched and grabbed at things even in your sleep.
I didn’t mean for you to take all the people away. That’s not what I gave it to you for! I didn’t want to hold onto all of them at once either—I only meant to use a few souls, but you went and tossed them all into the saltwater, and what else could I do? I clung to them, while you clung to me. Only for a little while. Just until we could bring the River back to life. That’s what I told myself, and I thought you understood.
But then you did something stupid. Instead of my plan, you put me in this body (If you’re wondering at this point whether I’ve forgiven you yet, the answer is no).
You took my hands, after it was done. I wanted to cry, but I hadn’t figured out the crying yet. I screamed instead, and you weren’t even frightened. I would have felt better if you’d been frightened.
You looked at me, and you loved me. I know that you loved me from the way your hands clung to mine.
I don’t like to think about when you put me in the tomb. You said you were going to show me something. You said it would be beautiful. You took my hands, you kissed me. Then you put me in a box where I couldn’t ever bother you again. You made me one of your childhood toys to be set away in a closet and never thought of. You said that you loved me, and then you locked me away from you because you were afraid of me.
THY FEAR WAS RIGHTEOUS AND THY TREMBLING JUSTIFIED. FOR I SAY UNTO THEE,
I'll still love you when I drive in the sword.
Anastasia once took me aside on a bright sunny day when I was standing on the balcony weeping saltwater tears. I’d finally figured out how, and I was practicing. You didn’t always like it when I practiced how to be a person, so I did it when you were busy.
That day, I was looking out at my ocean, at my leaping fish and my deep sea creatures, and I was thinking about the way I used to hold whale calves right after they’d been born. The squirming unwieldy weight of them in my palm—I thought of it as a palm now, even though I hadn’t even had hands back then.
I remembered the delight of witnessing a birth, the pang of love when the new creature emerged into my waters. The way I couldn’t see any of the whales anymore. It was something I thought should make me cry, so I did cry.
And this was where Anastasia found me. She was a sweet, quiet, knife-sharp sort of person, and I loved her eyes. Darker than yours. Sometimes I thought that if I hadn’t chosen you first, I might have liked to choose her.
When she came up to stand beside me, she was so light on her feet that I only knew it was her from the warmth of her entering the room, the displacement of air.
“Alecto?” she said.
She always called me by the name you’d given me, all of it. Mercy called me all sorts of things, Augustine sometimes called me “that monstrosity” when he thought I wasn’t around to hear. Which was stupid, because it wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t even me who had made me one.
I only ate his experiment the once, and it was barely half a finger anyway.
It was almost worse to hear you argue with him and know that you only half meant it. You really did think I was a monster, even if you wanted me to sleep wrapped around you too. Because you wanted me to sleep wrapped around you.
BEGONE MORTAL, FOR I WEEP IN AGONY, I said.
No, no, that’s not what I said. I said,
“Hi. I’m crying right now, so it probably isn’t a good time.”
I wasn’t sure what made it a good time, but this probably wasn’t it.
“It’s all right,” Anastasia said. “You can keep crying if you want.”
“Thank you,” I said. I kept crying.
“Is anything wrong?” she said after a moment.
I liked Anastasia because she knew to ask first, before telling me what she thought was wrong, telling me what I was sad about like you did sometimes. It’s not that you weren’t ever right, it’s just that it wasn’t the point.
“I wish I was the sea,” I said quietly.
“Oh,” she said.
She almost understood what I meant, though I think the details escaped her. Which was good, because you told me no one could know about me. I didn’t think that would be much of a problem. Your friends were awfully bad at knowing things, no offense.
Anastasia stepped closer and put her hand on my shoulder. I put my own hand on top of her hand, and we said nothing at all for a moment.
I could feel her pulse quick underneath my fingers. She would only ever lie in bed with Samael, but I knew that she wanted to kiss me sometimes. I didn’t think she’d like it as much after she’d done it as she did when she was thinking about it, so I never mentioned it.
Besides, I probably didn’t love Anastasia.
When I looked at you sometimes, and you glanced back at me, you would look surprised—like you couldn’t believe I really existed, like you wanted to know why. Like you thought I was beautiful, even in this form. On those days, I wanted to drag you down into the water and wrap the weeds around you and hold you there immobile, unchangeable, so I would have you forever.
When you told me you loved me, that’s what you meant.
But when I looked at Anastasia, I thought that she didn’t belong in the depths of the sea, but in cool, quiet corridors made of stone. She belonged somewhere with a breeze to blow her hair back and trace her forehead.
I didn’t want to grab onto her and hold her forever. Or at least, I only wanted that a little bit. Mostly I wanted her to smile, because when she smiled, she still looked sad, and I understood what she meant.
She was smiling at me that day on the balcony. She took my hair from where it had blown all directions, and she gathered it behind my neck and held it there, combing through with her thin careful fingers.
I sighed in relief.
“We can cut it,” she said. “If it’s bothering you. Samael just shaved all his. I could do the same for you if you wanted.”
I shook my head, shaking until she let go.
“I don’t want a shaved head. I want hair like yours.”
I turned, reached out for the little strands at her forehead—she flinched. Just barely, but I saw. I understood. It wasn’t that she didn’t want me to touch her. It was just, she was afraid.
I pulled my hand back.
“No,” she said. “You can. Go on.”
No, don’t stop, you always said when I wanted to rip into you, when I wanted to sink my fingers into your warm guts and my teeth into your veins and my body into your body, but held back, on the edge of some precipice I still didn’t quite understand. I knew your cells, I knew your marrow, I remembered you on my tongue and in my heart and between my legs too, though you would have laughed if I’d used those words to describe it.
You let me rip you apart. It never stuck. You always came back panting and dazed, like I’d just shown you the entire universe.
Once I asked you why you liked it, and you just said,
It’s the closest I’ll ever get, isn’t it?
And I didn’t tell you that it wasn’t like dying at all.
I can’t resist reaching, taking hold. I didn’t resist it for Anastasia either—I felt the squirming of thousands of sightless creatures in the pit of my stomach and I ran the very tips of my fingers through her hair, shivering at all the fine soft strands that brushed my fingers like sea grass.
She sighed. Her mouth opened to let the air out, and I thought of you. I thought of mouths—gasping, pressing, biting.
But otherwise, she didn’t react.
“We could always ask Mercy,” she said. “She colors Augustine's hair. At least, that’s what Pyrrha says. Pyrrha says no one has ever been that pale naturally.”
“They are sometimes,” I said. “But I don’t know why I ever thought yellow was a fine color to put in the world. How I hate yellow.”
I grabbed a fistful of my own hair, yanked not hard enough to pull it out, but hard enough to hurt.
Anastasia didn’t understand. But to my surprise, she laughed—just once, a little bell laugh, as perfect and secret as her smile.
She took my hand again and carefully unwound my fingers.
“Here, turn around. We can at least braid it.”
I turned around, and she put her hands on my shoulders to press me downward.
“You’re too tall. You’ll have to sit.”
“You’re too short,” I insisted. But I sat.
Secretly, I liked the way Anastasia was always reaching for things, climbing up on counters when she thought no one was looking. Nearly everything about her was lovely.
Her hands were lovely, warm on my scalp, and gentle even though I sort of wished that she’d tug harder. I looked out at my sea, and I listened for her heartbeat, and she braided my hair until it hung all the way down my back in a thick tidy plait.
Then she did tug on the plait, and I turned until I was kneeling in front of her. Her eyes were so dark, like night time in the desert. She took my jaw in her hands, and oh, her fingers were trembling just a little bit. And her pulse felt like hummingbird wings.
She leaned down—she didn’t have to lean far—and she kissed me. I held my mouth perfectly still, I was a statue, I was a thrashing sea, I was a woman. She was so light, so careful. I tried to memorize the shape of her lips so I’d know. So I’d remember later. When I thought about later, when I thought about clinging to the memory of her, I felt a pang of fear that nearly doubled me over.
She pulled back.
“Are you all right?”
She didn’t apologize. Anastasia never apologized unless she felt it was absolutely necessary, something I liked about her.
I shook my head.
“I think,” I said, “I do love you after all.”
Her face twisted briefly into an expression of steel sharp focus, and she studied me like maybe she was trying to memorize me too. She took another little breath, and then I saw the resolve. My stomach churned and churned.
I knew then what the future would hold. I knew then the exact weight of her dead bones. Dead in a place far beyond my reach.
“Bad idea,” she said. It seemed I was nothing but bad ideas, ever since I’d become shaped like a human. Maybe it was catching.
But she stepped in close and pulled my head to rest against her belly, where I felt the beginning of another secret. All life started as a secret, just a bundle of cells, just the echo of the echo of a soul.
“You’re—”
“I know,” she said. “I know. We’re thinking of keeping it.”
I could feel her sigh.
“It’s a shame you’re his cavalier,” she said lightly. “Blasphemy, yes, but it’s true. Who decided we could only have one?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t think she wanted an answer.
“I wish I could take you to the ninth installation. Win your favor and steal you away, just for a little while.”
I closed my eyes. The whole universe was her belly, pressed warm to my cheek. All I saw was the inside of my eyelids. The half-sunlit caverns just underneath my surface. The wombs of all creatures who carried their young this way.
“You have it already,” I said.
MY FAVOR IS YOURS, FROM NOW UNTIL THE BONES OF THE CHILDREN OF THY CHILDREN OF THY CHILDREN HAVE DIMINISHED INTO DUST.
And I knew she knew I wasn’t joking. Sometimes, you can't tell when I’m joking, but Anastasia always could. Or at least, she took everything deadly serious until she could figure out how I meant it. There was always an extra second of silence, a beat— it made for stop-and-start conversations with the rest. Your lemon-peach friend hated it, but thought she was very pretty, so never said anything except after she’d gone to bed with your paper-pale friend again and had to find things to complain about until she could work her way up to kicking him out of her room.
“Really?” Anastasia hummed approval, and her fingers traced my cheek, made mindless swirls on the cheekbones you’d grown for me. “Help me paint the nursery then. Once we figure everything out. Once we’re all immortal.”
Even then, she didn’t believe it. It was a future she wanted, one thread in a tapestry you’d ripped apart by the seams.
“You don’t want to be immortal,” I said. It was the closest I ever came to betraying you.
“Who’s going to watch over you, if I’m not there?”
I knew she didn’t want the answer to that either. Anastasia had never loved you—respected, worshipped, but never loved.
I said nothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m not.”
And she was lying.
Later, I saw her face above me as I slept—no, not her face. Too young, though what was time to me and you? Still, she looked freshly hatched, fingers smeared with your blood.
I thought then in my half-dead doze that you’d sent her back, that you’d figured out time after all, that you’d resurrected her for me. A gift.
And then she reached for me, brushed her fingers over the chains at my neck in amazement. I felt her entire soul grasp for me like she could pull me to her through force of want. I tasted the tear that fell upon my lips, saltwater, fresh and new.
It wasn’t Anastasia. And it wasn’t your blood.
You’d gone and had a baby with someone else. You’d done the human thing, the stupid thing—you’d tried to secure your legacy by locking me away in this crypt alone while you fucked your way through the galaxy until you found someone to give you your child so if I ever came back, you’d be able to say, look, you can’t kill me! I’ve made a new one!
And you thought I would look upon any part of you and spare it for its youth, for the fact it was a green shoot in a dark universe—even though you and your kind had chipped and scraped and annihilated my green shoots, my fresh living things. All for this dead fucking wasteland where no one even wanted to sing or scream or fight or fall upon each other in hunger. All for this tomb!
For a moment, my fury rushed through me with such clarity that I felt sure I would awaken and strike the intruder down. I would shout until you could hear me wherever you had hidden yourself away, you coward, you imbecile, you bastard, you—
And she looked at me, the creature newly hatched, and it was Anastasia’s firm mouth, and your depthless wonder, and I still—
My cage, my lock, my green shoot, my life and my death, I still—
“I’m yours,” she said. “Do with me as you will. I pledge myself to you.”
She put her hands on my hands. She couldn’t lift them—I was bound by your chains. Even if I hadn’t been, this body was heavy, misshapen, a chaos of long limbs and awful human flesh, and she was only a child. Small, even for a child. Unfed. A creature so newly born and so close to death at once that I felt an immediate revolting pity.
She pressed her mouth to the dead skin of my palm, and I could see that she loved me as you once loved the moment of dissolution, when all your atoms scattered across the room from each other, and with your last cells you thought maybe this time, I would let you destroy yourself.
And I almost sat up and said,
THIS PLEDGE REEKS OF FOOLISHNESS! WOULDST THOU DIE, IDIOT CHILD?
Ha, that’s funny. What I actually wanted to say was,
That’s no good! You’ll only die, stupid!
But in the end, all I could do was sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
After that, I dreamed of her sometimes. She screamed, and fought, and fell upon your child in hunger, all at once.
How I hated your child. How I hated her smile, all teeth, no joy anywhere to be found. This sharp blade of a child, yours as clearly as your hands were yours, yours from the surety of her footsteps in the dark to the way she cocked her eyebrow instead of answering a question. Yours in her clinging fingers, yours in her deflections, yours in her quiet tears alone at night, yours in her spineless fury, yours in her useless love.
In a different cold coffin of a bed, Anastasia’s daughter would lie like a corpse and pray to me.
And I tried to answer,
RUN, DAUGHTER OF THE NINTH, LEST THOU PERISH WITH THE REST OF THY KIN.
Ugh, no, why would I say it like that? I tried to say,
You’d better get out of here or you’ll be bones too.
And I tried to tell her that it was useless to hold onto your spawn and that she’d better get on the shuttle—but not to go visit my decaying body, the only home I’d ever known. It wasn’t her home. She’d never even seen a single whale. She wouldn’t miss them. She should get on the shuttle and find a place that wasn’t already dead. Let me rot.
But she didn’t let me rot, nor your child.
I know what love is. Love is an empty grave.
Love is the last thing forgotten, when all other memories fade away.
In the dream, I thought of what I’d say to you, when the time came. I thought about opening my eyes and seeing you in front of me, you in your unshaven mornings, you in all your shitty glory, you in the bed next to me. Your face close enough to my face that I could watch your eyes move underneath the lids, press my fingers there if I was curious and you’d wake up and swat my hand away, only half annoyed. And your palm on my belly. Source of all life. Source of all death.
Us there lying intertwined like the beginning and end of a sentence. Thus saith the Lord.
And you would say,
ANNABEL, GOOD MORNING.
And I would say,
YES, EVEN NOW.
And finally, I’d put my palm to the muscle in your chest, the one that throbbed in time with the solar flares.
And then finally,
finally,
I would let you go.
When Camilla woke me from this dream, I was crying saltwater tears, unable to say anything but NO, NO, NO.
She held me until I calmed down, until you were just a memory of a memory, and then, not even that. You vanished into me like a stone sinking beneath the water. I forgot you and was happy.
JOHN GAIUS, LET THE FEAR OF THE LORD OVERTAKE THEE IF I EVER REMEMBER MY LOVE FOR THEE. FOR LOVE IS THE TOMB IN WHICH I HAVE INTERRED MYSELF. AND EVEN SO, LOVE IS THE ROCK THAT SHALT BE ROLLED AWAY.
Hang on, that’s not right. I'm mixing things up again. Do you want to hear about the saltwater dream instead? That one’s much nicer, though I’m not sure I like the way it ends.
In the dream, we hold each other tight. And we never let go.