In a universe very, very close to this one, we are together. In the trillions upon trillions of universes extending outwards, the one where we are together is only separated from this one by several decisions, mostly made early in her life. My life is mostly the same. At this point, I’m jaded and a bit wary about love, and I watch dubiously as this spirited girl begins to steal into my heart.

The difference is that, in that universe, she watches me curiously back from across the room. Her stormy eyes are clouded with all of the possibilities as she weighs them, and at night she lies on her bed and allows herself to think, what if?

In that universe, the little comments that people make about us, the way she is so easy with me make her stop and think. She puffs out a breath and thinks, “I don’t want any of them, those far off lovers who are obscure and powerful, tinged with unreality and desirable with distance. I want this girl right here next to me. I want her to stay by my side, I want to hold her at night as we fall asleep with our cats snuggled up beside us.” In that universe, that is what she thinks.

The thing is, I don’t live in that universe. I live about five universes to the left of it, maybe a bit more diagonal, where I am the same, but she is much more steadfast and steely-eyed, determined to stick to the path she knows. Her past has closed her mind to any possibility that she could love me. She watches me indifferently at the beginning of the year, and as we grow closer, she keeps the blinders carefully fixed around her thoughts of me. They must not wander past what she has deemed acceptable.

In this universe, she takes me for a drive in her vintage car as the sun is setting, and I laugh when she steps on the gas and the car surges beneath us, so powerful I imagine it will leap to the stars, pin us up as a new constellation. Beneath the streetlights flying past us overhead, the midnight-blue paint of the car sparkles like it’s brand-new, new as my heart feels pounding in my chest.

I look over and she smiles her characteristic crooked grin, and my heart jumps into my throat. The sun is setting just over her left shoulder in a final blaze of glory, shedding its colors like brilliant dresses, stepping elegantly into a waiting bath of swirling stars. In the small, circular side mirror of the car, I can see the purples and pinks and golds mixing together like a palette of bleeding watercolors in the distance. Her black hair is haloed in a fine outline of gold, and I think sadly how beautiful she looks and how I will never be able to tell her.

In the next universe over, we pull back into the farm, drive past the horses watching us knowingly as the moonlight bathes their coats in silver, turning them to ghosts. We park the car, and she walks around to my side and helps me out. We go down to the lake and sit side by side on the dock, our feet crossed beneath us as I gently guide her hand to point out the constellations spiraling above us. In that universe, she turns to look at me, and I can see the stars in her eyes, but not Polaris, the storms in her gaze are too wild for that and-

In my universe, as we sit on the dock over the void of the lake, she gazes up in wonder at the stars and then turns to grin triumphantly at me as she finds Ursa Major captive beneath her fingertip. Of course, I want to tell her. Of course. And then, It’s yours. That bear would curl up beside you like a cat and let you stroke its fur of its own accord, but if it didn’t, I would bring it down for you. I would tame it, even as its eyes spit starfire and its claws open universes, if only I could hold you for the span of a heartbeat, if only-

I think all of these things as I roll my eyes at her and climb back in the truck beside her. I think these things, but I do not tell them to her because she has sworn me off, and maybe I love her, I don’t know, but I do know I will never hurt her.

On a pier in this universe, two figures lie suspended in time, basking in the summer sunshine. The tide is perpetually coming in and the sea foam sprays up over their legs. In this moment, I look in her sea-green eyes and she laughs, and I realize that here, in this universe, she will never love me, even as, a few decisions and occurrences to the left, she does.

I am the wind that caresses the arch of your cheekbone with my fleeting fingertips and plays in the twists of your hair.

I am the voice that cries out in the darkness, whose soul is rent beneath the light of the moon, the weave of my heart tugged loose.

I am she who mourns beneath the stars, their silver fire dripping like wet paint upon my cheeks, their heat pooling in the hollow of my throat.

I am the apathy and the lethargy, the beings that live in the emptiness and feed upon the loneliness of such fragile souls.

Some things that I have learned: They say time heals everything, and it does, but it doesn’t erase all traces of the past, the scars like white rope across the heart. Sometimes I go back to the house where I spent my days with her, starry-eyed and with my heart pinned to my sleeve, throbbing with hope for a future that to my eyes looked so bright.

I walk up the creaking wooden stairs now, my socked feet slipping on the polished wood and I crest the stairwell, and there’s the table where we once sat and worked physics problems together after school. There is where I laid my head with a sigh of defeat and where she bent to press kisses to my hair and where I reached up and caught her around the neck, pulling her down to me.

I walk into her bedroom and my heart goes numb because these wounds, they’re healed, but I can still remember the phantom marks of her knife so clearly that I look down to make sure my shirt is not bleeding through from the careful incisions across my heart.

I drop to my knees beside the one-thousand-piece puzzle we started the year it rained without end and which we swore that we would finish together that year. Now all the pieces lie shattered like glass across the table from where her younger cousins stumbled into it, and I want to laugh because you couldn’t have asked for a better sign than that. I tell her, “You need to get rid of this. It just makes me sad because we never finished it.” I say it lightly and she rolls her eyes at me because she sees a version of me that’s still whole and complete, just like she looks at that puzzle and sees the same thing.

She walks into the adjacent bathroom to finish putting on her makeup and I wander into the inner room where she sleeps. My heart echoes with phantom emotion, phantom desires and dreams that I have locked up deep inside it. I sit down on the bed and I think, this is where she pushed me down and curled around me and held me close, like she drank her life’s spirit from me, and maybe she did and that’s why I’m so empty now. I stare disdainfully down at the two ghosts lying intertwined, still whispering their secrets and their promises to each other in the early hours of the morning.

She emerges from the bathroom and I jerk, looking up in time to see her tossing the old too-big sweatshirt of hers that I used to sleep in into the closet.

Across the bed from me, my ghost sits up, her longer hair falling in tangles down her back, her eyes soft and vulnerable. My heart aches for her. Don’t do it, I think to her, but I know it’s useless. Even now, knowing all of the consequences, I’d still do it all over again.

The house is loud with a party, the noises of people talking and glasses clinking and laughter all filter in through the open doorway. I stand alone just inside her room, peering at the string of polaroid pictures she has draped above her dresser. On the bottom left corner, there is one dated March 12, or something close to it. I’ve tried to forget the exact date. I know that she was off by one day anyway when she dated it, so that helps. In it, she grins back at the camera, and I sit in the background in a too-big flannel, half-obscured, smiling demurely at the lens with light in my eyes.

I know that she never loved me because that picture is still there, hanging with the others. I always, every time, think of stealing it. Maybe I would burn it. Maybe I would put it in my shoebox of things that remind me of her and which still sits on the topmost shelf of my closet, as if that’s far enough away.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is tired of hearing my lament for her, and people tell me, “Haven’t you grieved long enough?” But I don’t decide when this pain should carve canyons out of my heart like black rivers. The flood comes in and I put that black pain down in black ink, the only way I can get it out of me.

There is not always a beautiful sunrise the morning after the storm. Sometimes, you wake up and you lean over and open the blinds and the rain is still coming down and the streets are flooding and the sky is moaning like she knows she’s lost something important, but she can’t remember what.

You clutched my glass heart in your fist until it shattered and then you dropped it so you wouldn’t have to feel the pain, and I was left clutching all of the pieces in my hands, scared to assess the damage even as the blood dripped in languid rivers between my shaking fingers.

It is hard to surrender to pain. I fight it, kicking and screaming, but it finally crawls into my bed and holds me like a lover, rocks me like the ghost of love. This is the only way to let the pain go. It opens its arms and takes it back into itself and when I open my eyes one morning, there are no more tears drying on my lashes.

He was standing before her, the outline of his body slightly blurred as though she were seeing him through a heat wave, but his eyes, they still cut into her flawlessly. Silver, glassy orbs that were fastened steadfastly on her own stricken face, sensing perhaps, the very throb and beat of her heart.

She shook her head, looked away. This was too dangerous right now. How could she-

When she raised her head again, he was a stone’s throw away from her, listening, expectant.

She closed her eyes for a moment then, knowing he would be closer still when she opened them again, and then she was picking out the stars trembling beneath his skin, the galaxies forming and collapsing in swirls of vibrant color on his forearms, the suns dying and being reborn again at her fingertips. She glimpsed his hand for only a fleeting moment, yet she knew that she had seen at least a millennium fly past in that moment, from birth to death.

Finally, she lifted her gaze to those opaque eyes, staring so blankly at her only because they could see a world beyond her. Or perhaps he was seeing her, but a version of her that thrived far in the past or in the future, her soul distorted into shapes worlds apart from how she appeared before him now.

Wordlessly, she reached out, dusting a few constellations from his skin as she took his hand in hers, and watched as the stars bled over into her skin as well, transforming her hand into a temporary map of deep space. His fingers burned where they striped against her flesh, lines of pale fire branding into her bare skin.

“Where am I supposed to go now?” she asked him, her tone lilting up almost defiantly. He turned his head fractionally to the right, his eyes shifting in their sockets as they located what he was searching for.

With a decisive nod, he turned back to her, his eyes coming as close to focusing on her as they ever had. She listened, her fingers coming loose from his to trace up his arm to the galaxy he put forth.

“Without you?”

He was silent before her, an answer in itself.

With a soft smile, she took his hand once more and raised it to her mouth briefly, feeling the star fire burn for a moment at her lips before she softly brushed them across his skin until her entire cheek rested against the back of his hand.

Immediately, she felt the universes swirling within his body began to seep into her own pale skin, inky tendrils snaking across her face like bursts of watercolor. Stars washed into the depths of her eyes as if sucked in by twin black holes, and when she drew in a shuddering breath, she felt supernovae expand within her lungs.

When she felt the very edges of her being beginning to blur away, shivering into and out of existence, she channeled all of her energy into pulling away from him because if she didn’t do it now then-

When she opened her eyes, it was night. Three moons hung in the sky above her, two as pale as she remembered and one as red as blood.

She shrinks back against the wall, the eerie opaque blue of her eyes seeming to glow as they are cast in shadow. She cannot see in the normal sense, but she can sense, and she knows enough to recognize the presence of the being before her. Genies, after all, have a very characteristic aura.

Her body is tight as a live wire, her claw-like nails digging into the rotting wood at her back as she listens to the ragged, hissing voice of the entity. She listens to what he offers, and her head tilts to the right slightly, as though studying his words from a different angle.

When she finally makes a move to answer, the sound that wrenches from her lips is barely there, a quiet hiss of wry laughter.

“You claim that you can solve all things, and yet can you heal the rifts in my heart? Can you fix everything that has been denied me, the birthdays missed, the weddings, the deaths? One of your kind already tore me from my world, trapped me here! Why should I trust you?”

The genie snorts, and the girl can sense the air before her beginning to ripple more aggressively, the hair on her arms standing up in reaction. The whole room feels electric.

“It’s not my job to convince you to trust me,” the genie finally drawls. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve fulfilled my duty.”

In the face of a supernatural being’s disdain, the girl simply holds up a hand, her face averted. There is a single wrinkle on her brow, furrowing the skin between her eyes, blank as dusty marbles.

When she speaks again, her voice is quiet. “Then what can you do for me? My problem is a rupture of the soul. In the absence of needles, can you at least take me home?”

The spirit regards her coldly for a moment, and then lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose with a sigh.

“Will that fix your broken heart?” he finally quips sardonically. Even to the girl’s ears, though, it sounds like a surrender.

She huffs, rolls her blank eyes, stands up straight. For the first time in a long while, a sense of vibrancy and life begins to creep back into her frame.

She brushes past the genie, wordlessly making her way towards the entrance of the room.

The genie, for his part, rolls his eyes skywards, but does the girl the service of opening the door before she can walk into it.

It has been one hundred years since the day I stood in the doorway with the wind clawing its fingers through my hair and turned, finally, into its hungry embrace, deciding then that I would never look back at you.

It is the anniversary of the day I fled into the woods surrounding our cottage, woods that used to protect me, but now suffocated me, the trees lashing their branches together and spitting water down upon my shoulders as if they mourned for me, but still could not let me go.

I ran until my feet tracked blood behind me along with the remains of my soul, unspooling from me like silver thread still caught between your fingers.

It has been one hundred years since I stumbled through the rain, and the edge of the chasm yawned before me, and I closed my eyes, expecting to feel the fall, but I never did. Instead, when I opened my eyes, the stars swam before me like rungs on a ladder, and I tangled my fingers around their sharp edges and pulled myself upward. Their light lodged beneath my fingernails and my blood stained some of them so red, the astronomers peered up in shock and could not explain their unexpected jump to supernova.

When I reached the overarching dome of the universe, I banged my fists on the glass, crying for entry, but I was just a soul trapped beneath the ice, and I couldn't climb any further. The dust of the cosmos lodged in my throat and with its bitter taste in my mouth, I swam back down towards where you waited.

I lived in the branches of the trees above where you walked, I wove the stems of flowers together into crowns to adorn my hair, just to have something mortal still about me. I watched you grow older from afar, watched the life bleed out of you naturally, not like mine, not like the knife wound in my shoulder the night I fled.

When your soul shed your body like snakeskin and, shaking itself, began its own upward climb, I watched the stars until their molten silver dripped onto my cheeks like paint, allowing me the facade of tears. I saw you swim through the dome that's trapped me for, now, one hundred years. Kneeling above the Milky Way, I knit crowns out of stars, and sometimes, when I'm moved to, I place the stars in the eyes of mortals who remind me of who I could have been.