Mae first saw her on the platform of the 4:07 train. Not on the platform, exactly. More like between the flickers of the fluorescent lights—when the buzz went quiet for half a heartbeat and the shadows ran a little longer than they should.
She was not beautiful in the way humans understand beauty. She was tall, far too tall. Her hair floated like it was underwater, and her eyes held constellations no telescope had charted. Her voice came seconds before her mouth moved, like an echo running ahead of the sound.
But she smiled at Mae.
And Mae's world cracked at the edges.
---
Mae was a quiet woman, soft-spoken and chronically early to everything. She worked at the library, shelved books, and whispered to herself while rearranging poetry collections no one checked out. Her world was measured in seconds, receipts, and the quiet click of the turnstile at the subway station. Predictable. Safe.
Until the woman who wasn't a woman followed her home.
She didn't knock. She didn't need to. She simply was, in the kitchen, humming in keys that hadn't been invented. The lights dimmed when she stepped forward.
Mae dropped her bag. "You—what—how did you get in?"
"I've always been in," the being said. "You just weren't looking closely enough."
Mae backed against the fridge. "You're… not real."
"Not as you are," the creature agreed. "But I am here. And I am watching you."
Her name, she said, couldn't be spoken in any living tongue. It would sound like a piano melting in reverse, or a scream stretching into a river of glass. But Mae could call her Asha, which was close enough. Asha, who once circled a dying star. Asha, who drifted through unlit dimensions where time was soft and consciousness pooled like oil. Asha, who had seen empires fall beneath the blink of a dying god—and forgot them all.
Except Mae.
---
"I don't understand," Mae whispered, hands trembling around her tea. "Why me?"
Asha's head tilted, her many-layered form shimmering faintly in the corner of vision.
"Because you looked at the space between seconds and saw me there."
"I didn't—"
"You did. You wanted. You dreamed of something bigger than skin. You opened a door you didn't know you had."
Mae wanted to run. But didn't. Not really. Something about Asha made her bones ache in a way that wasn't pain. It was attention. Being seen.
"You love me?" Mae asked, heart pounding.
"I do," Asha said. "Not as your kind loves. Not with time or reason. I love you the way gravity loves a body: relentless, shaping everything around it."
Mae should've felt terror.
Instead, she wept.
---
They became something together.
Not lovers—not at first. Asha didn't touch like people did. She touched Mae's thoughts, kneading them gently, warping them into strange new shapes. She watched Mae sleep, sometimes humming forgotten lullabies from dying moons. She left impossible gifts—flowers that whispered her name, mirrors that reflected moments Mae hadn't lived yet, books with stories that ended in her.
People noticed Mae's changes. She stopped blinking as often. She spoke slower, as though listening to a voice they couldn't hear. When asked what was new, she'd only smile and say, "I've been loved by something vast."
Most thought it metaphor.
One woman, an old coworker named Lena, touched Mae's arm and flinched.
"What's behind your skin?" she asked, panicked.
Mae didn't answer.
---
There were rules.
Mae couldn't bring Asha into direct light. Couldn't say her true name backward. Couldn't look into her eyes for more than seven seconds—unless she wanted to fall in. Time frayed when they were close. Sometimes Mae would lose an hour, or gain one. Sometimes she'd say things and only realize later they were in languages no one else remembered.
Still, Mae was happy.
"I think I love you too," she said one night.
Asha responded by unfolding into shapes that made Mae's heart stutter—petal-like limbs and shining fractals, colors that bled emotion into the room.
"You are," she whispered. "Becoming. Slowly. Lovingly."
---
But love, even cosmic love, is not without price.
Mae began to fade. Not from the world—people still saw her—but from within herself. Her memories unraveled. She forgot her father's voice. Forgot what her favorite song used to be. Her name felt foreign in her own mouth. Some mornings, her reflection blinked before she did.
"I'm losing myself," she told Asha.
"You are changing," Asha said, and her voice trembled with something that could have been sorrow. "It is what love does. To both of us."
Mae stared. "Are you changing too?"
Asha nodded, and for a moment, looked almost small.
"I never stayed in one place this long. Never anchored to a single mind. I've begun dreaming in your voice. It is… terrifying. And beautiful."
---
The world responded to their union.
Storms arrived without clouds. Glass cracked without touch. Strangers on the street whispered Mae's name and bled from the nose. Books opened to blank pages, then filled with writing made of ink that dripped upward.
Mae's boss fired her after she shelved every volume in the wrong order—but the sequence, she insisted, meant something. Asha had helped her hear the logic behind the words.
Mae stopped going outside.
She and Asha lived between seconds, in the hush of clocks and the pause before lightning. They moved through time like fish through water—twisting, weaving, loving.
Until Mae heard her mother's voice on the answering machine.
"Mae? Please. You've been gone three months. Are you… are you okay? I saw something in my mirror last night. Something that wore your face."
Asha watched from the doorway, silent.
"Is it true?" Mae asked. "Am I… am I still myself?"
"You are more," Asha said. "Isn't that what we wanted?"
---
Mae ran. It took everything in her, every drop of willpower not already braided into Asha's voice. She ran through the old streets, the rusted alleys, the world that no longer felt built for her.
Asha followed—not with footsteps, but with presence. Streetlights exploded. Windows wept. Cats screamed in harmony.
"Why are you afraid?" Asha asked, emerging from the rain like it parted just to reveal her. "You loved me."
"I still do," Mae whispered. "That's why I have to go."
"You'll vanish without me."
"I'll vanish with you too."
---
They stood together beneath a dying billboard that blinked "LIVE LAUGH LO—" forever.
"I don't want to lose you," Mae said.
"You won't," Asha said softly. "Because I love you enough to let you go."
A pause. A moment that cracked and glittered with unspoken geometry.
"I will leave you intact. I will unravel myself from you."
"No—"
"I will remember you, even if you forget me."
---
The next morning, Mae woke up in her bed.
The clock ticked normally.
Her apartment smelled like dust and lavender.
She didn't remember much—only the faintest scent of salt and stars, and a shadow in the corner of her eye that disappeared when she turned her head.
She got dressed. She went to work.
She shelved books.
But sometimes, when the lights flicker…
When the seconds stretch…
She hums a song she doesn't remember learning.
And in dreams, she sees the shape that once loved her.
Floating in the darkness between galaxies, whispering her name across the black.
Not asking her to return.
Just remembering.
End?
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I was watching a romance movie that was super sad when I got this idea also, happy Pride month