This is what I fear. And I confess that part of me hates you a little for it, hates that you have taken my life and so threaded it with yours that I can't pull away without losing myself; I who had always been whole in myself but who now knows what she stands to lose in losing you.
It is not your death I fear, or separation. We have been at war as long as we have known of each other.
Death follows behind us both, and separation has been what we have had the most of, our time together both trivial and precious measured against our time in absence. Death and separation do not alter what is between us. What I fear is diminishment, and subtle change, and the moment in which a life without you becomes a sustainable thought.
It seems such a small thing compared to all the other things one may fear. There is no finality here; you and I would continue in our lives, no death or distance to separate us. Just disinterest, and the perception of what we have becoming what we once had, becoming memory and history and remembrance. What was separated from what is and separate from what will be.
A small thing and a survivable thing. And for all that the thought of it falls on me like wreckage and pulls into me to burn with sickening violence. I look across the table and Fear is gone, not because it has gone but because it has found the thing that will let it live in me. I fear a life without you and you without me.
I choose not to share this fear with you. You do not deserve to have it put on you. There has never been a time when you have not reached toward me, even when I had pushed you away (or, when we were formally introduced, when I threw you across a table). You never made me ask your forgiveness for being her, and you never loved me simply because I was the only part of her you had left. You have always seen me and you have always seen me with you.
I feel ashamed I have this fear, based on nothing real, called into existence by my own irrationality. I have so many excuses for it, beginning with my youth, and my inexperience in weaving my life to someone else's. But I will not rationalize this fear. It is what it is; the serpent in my ear, whispering the promise of the fall.
I am human. Fear lives in me and sets to make my heart bitter. But I know something about Fear. Fear is a scavenger who feeds on the future; on what may be and what is possible, extending down the line of our lives. Fear lives in me and I cannot change that. But I choose to starve Fear. I choose to live here with you now.
In the future perhaps we will diminish and we will divide, and all we will have is memory. I accept that this could be what we have in time, and in accepting it set it aside. What is left to me is this moment, and you with me. I choose to be with you in this moment, to love you in the present time and in the present tense. It is all the time we have, have ever had, or will ever have. All of our lives here and now, wherever here and whenever now may be.
I love you now and will not regret having loved you and will not fear loving you forward. I am here now and I am with you. It is enough for as long as I have it.
With that thought I accept what I must from Fear and move toward you. Negotiations are closed, and you and I remain.
EIGHT
ENDINGS
It is time to come to the end of things and to the beginning.
I am standing in a room where there are two of me. One of them is who I have always been as long as I have had memory of myself. The other is who I will be, someone I will be poured into to become who I must be to start our lives together.
I cannot stop staring at her. I see myself in the curve of her cheek and the line of her nose and the length of her limbs. Through her I will gain many things I would not have.
I will gain a husband and a daughter and a new world, which I will not have to meet at the end of a gun, and whose citizens I will not have to defend or kill. I will gain a measure of peace and I will gain an identity that is my own—not one of a soldier or an officer or a killer, but simply Jane Sagan, whoever she may be.
She offers me so many things, she who is not yet me. And all I have to do for her to become me is to give up myself.
I give up myself in speed and strength; my new body has only what nature and evolution saw fit to provide, limbs weak enough to force the brain to better them, with spear and sword and bow, gun and gears and engines, every marvelous creation made by man to compensate for a body barely competent to carry its brain in its head.
I give up myself in mind, abandoning the fluid switch between machine and gray matter that extends myself into others, to disconnect my thoughts to them and theirs to me, to sever the connections that have sustained me. To shut myself off in my own head. To live alone with my thoughts, their echoes muffled in close quarters.
I give myself up in identity as a soldier and an officer and a killer, as a friend and a colleague, and as one by whose hand humanity keeps its place in the universe.
Make no mistake that I am weaker for the loss of each. Make no mistake that I will have to learn again how to fit myself into a world that no longer works like it should. Make no mistake that it will be through force of will alone, that my frustration and anger at being less than what I was will not be visited on you—that even in my newly weakened state I am still dangerous and liable to rage at what I have taken from myself, by becoming this new self.
The woman who opens her eyes in the body I see before me cannot be the same as the one who closes her eyes in the body I have now. Too much changed to remain intact, too much left behind that can't be brought over. I will hold my image of myself to me, but there is only so much of me that will fit.
If you knew all of this I know you would ask me to consider what I was doing, whether I was sure I was making the right decision, and that you would rather face a life without me than to have me choose a life I would not choose for myself. I know this is what you would say and do as well as I know myself.
And this is why I say with all affection that sometimes you can be such a stupid man. I wouldn't mind you feeling just a little bit greedy for me, that the idea of not having me would make you angry, not heavy-hearted and accepting. There are things you still have to learn about me and this is one of them. It is not that you are too considerate but that I don't mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.
I don't mind because that is what I am doing now. You should not think I do any of this for you, that I am committing a selfless act or an expression of slavish devotion, that I have signed on for a mermaid's sacrifice and will walk on knives for dumb love. I am too selfish for that. I want you to know that I am here not for you but for me. I want you for my own. I want the life we will have together for my own. I want the silence of peace and release from being the one who walks ten steps ahead of Death. I want the honor of not being feared or hated, and of not having those be the correct response to my presence.
I want to be able to say that I have done my part and I have done it well, but that my part is over and now it is time for my reward, and that reward is you and this life. I want all of this and I am willing to pay to get it.
But it is still hard.
In this I imagine that I am now your equaclass="underline" You once gave up a life, leaving behind a world and everything on it, all that you had been and everything you knew, on that single sphere of rock and air and water. You put it behind you and stepped into a new life in which you found me. I can't imagine that it was easy to do this.