There are moments in life when time folds in on itself — when years can collapse into a single heartbeat, and a single breath can stretch across lifetimes. I remember the weight of her voice. Not the words she said, but the way they settled in me like sunlight on skin after the longest winter.
We were young enough to believe "forever" was possible, and old enough to know it was a beautiful lie. That didn't stop us from trying to reach it anyway.
…
Her laugh carried something rare — like wind chimes caught in a summer storm, delicate but unbreakable. My chest would tighten every time she looked at me, as if she could see through every wall I had ever built around myself.
And she probably could.
"You're always so serious," she would say, her fingers tracing patterns in the air between us — a gesture that became as familiar as breathing. "Like you're carrying the weight of two worlds."
If only you knew, I would think, but never say.
Because how do you tell someone you are carrying two worlds? That every morning you wake up not knowing which reality is the dream?
…
"Love" isn't the right word for what we had. It's too small, too simple. What we shared felt like a recognition — the kind that comes from knowing someone across time, across distance, across the impossible spaces between what is and what could be.
And maybe we had known each other before. Maybe that's why, when I woke up in another place — another world, another life, another version of myself — I swear I could still feel her presence. Not in memory. Not in dreams.
In the spaces between my heartbeats.
…
She had a way of looking at things — of really looking — as if she was reading a story written in languages the rest of us had forgotten. When she smiled, it was never just happiness. It was understanding. And her eyes — the color of melted silver under moonlight — always seemed to hold secrets she kept just for me.
There was a scent that followed her, subtle as a morning breeze: flowers that didn't exist in this world, but that my heart recognized as if they were home.
"Promise me one thing," she said once, during one of those golden afternoons when the light came through her window just right, painting everything in shades of honey and hope.
"What?" I asked, though I would have promised her anything.
"When you find who you're supposed to be — who you're really supposed to be — don't lose who you are now."
I didn't understand it then. How could I? I didn't know that one day I would be in another world, sword in hand, being called a hero by people who needed saving. I didn't know I would have to choose between the boy who loved in silence and the man who could change everything.
I didn't know that love wasn't about finding someone.
It was about remembering.
…
The last time I saw her, we were on the brink of everything left unsaid. The kind of moment that feels like a photograph being taken — permanent, yet already becoming a memory.
"I have to go," I said, the words tasting of ash.
She nodded, but her eyes held all the questions I couldn't answer. Where? Why? When will you be back?
"I know," she whispered. "I've known for a while."
The silence stretched between us, heavy with all the conversations we would never have, all the tomorrows we would never share.
"Will you wait?" I asked, hating myself for the selfishness of the question.
Her smile was sad, soft, and infinite.
"I'll always be here," she said. "But you already know that, don't you?"
…
I did.
Even as the world shifted around me, when I found myself in a place where magic was real and monsters were something you fought instead of something that lived inside your chest — even then, I carried her with me.
Not as a memory.
As a promise.
That no matter how far I traveled, no matter what I became or what I had to do to survive, there would always be a part of me that remembered what it was like to be loved without conditions. To be seen without judgment.
To be enough, exactly as I was.
…
Years passed there. Real years, with real battles and real choices that changed me in ways I'm still trying to understand. I learned to fight. I learned to lead. I learned that sometimes, the greatest act of heroism is knowing when to step aside and let someone else shine.
But I never learned to stop looking for her in other faces.
…
When I came back—when the world bent around me once more and dropped me back into a life that had moved on without me—she was the first thing I looked for.
The last thing I let myself find.
Because some loves are too precious to risk. Some connections are too pure to be tested against the weight of who you've become.
So I chose distance. I chose the dull ache of wondering what if, instead of the possible devastation of finding out what isn't.
I told myself it was to protect her. That it was noble. That it was kind.
I told myself it was love.
But maybe it was just fear dressed up as virtue. Fear that the boy she remembered had vanished, replaced by someone who had seen too much darkness to deserve light so pure.
Maybe I wasn't protecting her.
Maybe I was protecting myself from the truth that I was no longer worthy of her.
…
But love—real love, the kind that transcends time and space and the terrible mathematics of the heart—doesn't work that way.
It doesn't ask you to be perfect.
It doesn't demand you stay the same.
It only asks you to remember.
To carry forward the best parts of who you were, even as you become who you're meant to be.
…
That's what I'm learning now, in this new city, with these new chances and these new choices stretching out before me like roads to anywhere.
That love isn't about holding on.
It's about letting go.
And discovering that some people are connected to you in ways that transcend choice, distance, even worlds.
And sometimes, if you are very lucky, if you are very brave, it's about coming back.
…
Her name was Luna.
Is Luna.
And one day — in this world or another, in this life or the next — I will find the courage to say all the things I never said. To be all the things I never was.
To love in the way she taught me how to love:
Without fear.
Without reservation.
Without end.
…
But first, I have to become worthy of it.
First, I have to become who I'm supposed to be.
First, I have to learn that being a hero isn't about saving others from who you think you should protect them from.
It's about having the courage to save yourself from the person you're afraid to be.
Even when that person is yourself.