There are moments when time folds in on itself — when years collapse into a single heartbeat, and a single breath stretches across lifetimes. I remember the weight of her voice. Not the words she spoke, but how they settled into 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 reaching for it anyway.
…
Her laughter carried something rare — like wind chimes caught in a summer storm, delicate yet unbreakable. My chest would tighten every time she looked at me, as if she could see through every wall I'd ever built around myself.
She probably could.
"You're always so serious," she'd say, 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'd think, but never say.
Because how do you tell someone you're 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 recognition — the kind that comes from knowing someone across time, across distance, across the impossible spaces between what is and what could be.
Maybe we'd known each other before. Maybe that's why, when I woke up somewhere else — 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 — really looking — as if she were 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, molten silver under moonlight, always seemed to hold secrets she kept just for me.
There was a fragrance that followed her, subtle as morning breeze: flowers that didn't exist in this world, but that my heart recognized as home.
"Promise me something," she said once, during one of those golden afternoons when 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 really are — don't lose who you are right now."
I didn't understand then. How could I? I didn't know that one day I'd stand in another world, sword in hand, being called a hero by people who needed saving. I didn't know I'd 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 stood on the threshold of everything left unsaid. The kind of moment that feels like a photograph being taken — permanent, but already becoming memory.
"I have to go," I said, the words tasting like ash.
She nodded, but her eyes held all the questions I couldn't answer. Where? Why? When will you come back?
"I know," she whispered. "I've known for a while."
Silence stretched between us, heavy with the weight of all the conversations we'd never have, all the tomorrows we'd never share.
"Will you wait?" I asked, hating myself for the selfishness of it.
Her smile was heartbreak made beautiful, infinite in its sadness.
"I'll always be here," she said. "But you already know that, don't you?"
…
I did.
Even when 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 felt 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 returned — 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 searched for.
The last thing I allowed myself to find.
Because some loves are too precious to risk. Some connections too pure to test against the weight of who you've become.
So I chose distance. I chose the dull ache of wondering what if over the possible devastation of discovering 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 disappeared, replaced by someone who'd seen too much darkness to deserve such pure light.
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 that you remember.
That you 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 new choices stretching 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're very lucky, if you're very brave, it's about coming back.
…
Her name was Luna.
IsLuna.
And someday — in this world or another, in this life or the next — I'm going to find the courage to say all the things I never said. To be all the things I never was.
To love the way she taught me 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 they should be protected from.
It's about having the courage to save yourself from the person you're afraid to be.
Even when that person is yourself.