You and I have always been on the wrong sides, I can see it now. Lying on this cold concrete floor, watching you throw away your life for me, I’m struck by how familiar this whole dying sensation feels. It’s all been like this before, a hundred times. In the darkening corners of my vision I can see us, spinning back through time, always doomed and always hopeful.

We’ve both betrayed each other. When the mob came to your house, I was the boy in the back with his father’s sword, looking sick and pale in the lamplight. When we burst inside, you dropped your bowl and there was wine all over the floor where we threw you, stabbing and kicking and cursing. We dipped rags in your blood and paraded your body through the streets and we called you a traitor to the state. We threw your body to the wild beasts and left your soul to wander without burial or blessing.

But you got yours. You led the mutiny into my cabin and dragged me from my berth onto the deck. You didn’t tear the shirt from my back or hit me with the cane, but there was a kind of happy hate in your eyes when others did. When they tied to me to the mast and left me there, you were the one who brought me water, cupping your hand against the back of my head to make me drink. I died slow and sun baked from heat and hunger.

It wasn’t always violent, but there was always pain. The time I worked in your father’s house, scrubbing floors and making beds. We grew up ten feet from each other, never touching, barely looking at each other’s eyes. What a sweet torture. I think I was a girl that time, with huge eyes and long hair. I think there was another time we were both girls, clinging to each other’s soft necks when the bombs came raining down on our city and we were both terrified and silent and I hated you because you didn’t, or couldn’t, cry.

I remember riding horses through the desert with the sand and sky brilliant in the moonlight. I remember ships with the faces of dragons and the spray of the salt water cool on my face. I remember your eyes. I don’t think there was ever a time I looked into your eyes and didn’t feel, happy or sad or scared or angry, and it didn’t matter if the eyes you were wearing were green or blue or grey or brown with laugh lines and crow’s feet.

Someday, someday, if I squint I can barely see, it will be you and me together. You and me with nothing between us, not even blood. I’ll come to you and I’ll tell you my name and you’ll laugh because you knew it all along. You’ll raise your hand to my face and I’ll pull you close to my body and we’ll be…we’ll just be.