The boss I can almost live with. A fair fight, even a long stupid one across two worlds, has a kind of cleanness to it. We were enemies, and enemies at least agree on the terms.
This one’s different. This one I’ve been sick about all day.
There’s a person in my life — I’m going to keep them a little blurred, because they’re real, and alive, and asleep across town as I write this, and they don’t deserve to be a character — who I have always treated just slightly worse than I treat everyone else. Nothing dramatic. A coldness I could never account for. A way I have of not quite showing up for them; of letting their calls go a beat too long; of being a fraction less generous than I’d be with a stranger. For years, when I noticed it at all, I told myself we just didn’t click.
I placed the face last night. It’s the one I betrayed on the red world.
I don’t have all of it. The remembering gives you the weight before it gives you the details, which is its own special cruelty. But I have enough. On Mars, in one of those lives, this soul trusted me — really trusted me, put something that mattered into my hands — and I took the side that was better for me, and I let them go down. I didn’t even do it in a rage. That’s what’s eating me. I did it coldly, clear-headed, because it served me — in that same “consciously unloving” way I keep finding at the bottom of everything I’ve ever broken.
And here they are. Same soul. Brand-new face. Sitting in my life, calling a little too often, getting my coldness for reasons neither of us could ever have named — until now, when only one of us can.
You want to know the thing the material says that I can’t shake tonight? It says we don’t get sent these people as a punishment. It’s not a sentence I’m serving. They’re here — I’m here — because some part of both of us wanted another run at it. We made the appointment ourselves. This whole aching arrangement is, if you can believe it, a kindness. A second crack at a thing I got catastrophically wrong.
I have been given back the person I betrayed. Awake this time, and knowing it.
I have no idea what you’re supposed to do with a gift like that. I only know I can’t keep being cold. Not now. Not knowing.