Hi Tess,

  This morning I woke with a picture of you in my mind, the way you looked against the lights that line the river in the Citadel.

  I dragged you away from your research for the night, and we took a gondola ride down the river, even though you said it was an overpriced diversion for rich people with nothing to do.

  You were right (you’re always right), but I think you were glad we went. We drank wine, and you told me about the progress you’d made in your lab. We both knew I didn’t understand most of it, but that didn’t matter. I could listen to you talk forever. Even if I sometimes got a little jealous of the blood samples and slides and the little molecules that warranted so much of your attention… I couldn’t hold it much against them. Not when it made your eyes light up like it did.

  You held my hand and leaned your head on my shoulder and talked about unique markers in the blood that were like little windows to you into a whole world. You could look at a drop of someone’s blood and learn so much about the person; it was uncanny.

  I could have watched you like that all night. A glass of wine ignored in your free hand, the lights of the gondola shining off your hair, your voice alight with the passion you only truly found in inquiry and discovery.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  I sometimes wish I had a mind like yours. I wish I could see so clearly into the heart of a thing by looking at its smallest parts. But more than that, I wish I could go back there. To that night. Before the Committee, and the keepers and the sleepless nights. Before they demanded you testify and punished you for telling the truth. Before the Citadel demanded more of your mind and body than you could give.

  Oh, Tess, I would go back there a thousand times a day in my mind, but sometimes I try to stay away. I’m afraid that if I visit too often, I’ll dull the memory: both the sweetness and the pain. Or worse, that I will corrupt it. That my own traitorous memory will slowly replace parts of you with elements of my own creation until there’s none of you left. That might be the worst fate of all: to see you driven first from my present, and then from my past as well. To see you exist as nothing but a cobbled-together collection of gentle lies told to me by my mind.

  It wasn’t like that this morning, though. Don’t ask me how I know. Maybe because it was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, before my thoughts had a chance to intrude. To pollute.

  This morning I had a few seconds with the real you and it was like a little miracle. Like injecting life into a nearly collapsed vein.

  I was going to write today about the station but that will have to wait. I feel as if you’ve finally written back. As if we’ve truly communed for the first time since you left me.

  I know it won’t last. It’s already mostly dissipated as I sit here drinking coffee and preparing for my patients today, but you’ll forgive me if I bask as long as I can.

  I am just writing to say thank you. For the message, for the memory, for the fact of you.

  All my love,

  Samar