Our Infinite Fates

I WAS CARRYING ARDEN ’ S soul in my hands. Of that much I was certain.

As I lay on my bed drinking sweet, milky coffee, I read Ten Hundred Years of You from cover to cover, every line, every stanza etching grooves into my chest. It was as though Mikha was back from the dead; that version of Arden I so often missed. A different person entirely from the cold-hearted executioner in El Salvador.

One poem described Arden’s heart as a haunted house, surrounded by a moat of their own digging. It cast their stoicism in a new light, made me think that perhaps they hated the way they had become, so closed off and unfeeling, but that it was less painful than the alternative: letting themselves love, with the knowledge it could only end one way.

I thought of my own pre-emptive grief, the way I doggedly rehearsed loss as though it somehow protected me from the inevitable pain, and I thought maybe Arden had a point. Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it.