Ess calls me friday afternoon, asks me if I want to spend the night with her. I did have some plans, but nothing that couldn't be rescheduled. When I get there, I'm spirited away straight to her room, and after we both go in, she shuts the door behind her. 'Can we just stay in bed tonight?', she asks. I can see she's tired, so I just say 'Sure, let's do that.' And that's all we do that night, and it feels good. The truth is that I like being with her, and I like spending time with her. I have no idea where this is going, but I'm willing to stick it out. It seems that she'd planned this advance, because she had food and drinks waiting. We still haven't figured out what this thing we had going on was, and neither have we had serious talk regarding 'us', though we talk a lot every single day. I think she likes me? Yeah, with a question mark at the end. Because I'm not yet sure that she does, but I think so, at least sometimes - like now - she certainly makes me feel like she does. She always gets up earlier than I do, and I always wake up to a 'good morning' text from her. Also, there's this way that she touches, I feel her hands always on me, as if they're forever searching, and my god, when I don't feel her touch I feel like a chunk of me is missing. So that night, we have our meal and drink a couple of glasses of wine, then we go to sleep. Just before we fall asleep, as we're laying facing each other, she lapses into utter silence, which she breaks by thanking me for having come over. I tell her I really wanted to come, I was looking forward to being with her again. And she flashes me a little, sad smile, before we kiss goodnight.
We get up early next morning, but not crazy early. She says that where we're going isn't too far, but we still had to get on a bus to get there. Neither of us drove, so we depended on public transportation, but that was OK. We leave her place, and I ask her if she wants to get some breakfast - on me. Ess thinks it's a wise suggestion, and she takes us to a diner close to where she lives. Coffee and toast, good, simple fare, and we're ready to go. I realize then that this if the first time we're going somewhere together. Or as a couple, even. Are we a couple? I don't know, and I'm afraid to broach that subject. We're walking down the street side by side, and I feel my hand moving towards her. As it touches hers, and tries to hold it, she recoils at once. She stops, and looks mad at me, and asks, 'What do you think you are doing? We're not there yet.', she says, and I want to say that if we're not there yet, then how come a) we'd already had sex, bad though it may have been and b) if holding hands is taboo, how come do we sleep together?, but I just demurely apologize. 'Look', she says, 'you have to give me time, ok?', and instead of saying 'yes' or something to that effect, I feel a sigh of frustration escaping my mouth. I can feel the chill in the air as she says, 'What?', and everything I kind of wanted to say but didn't just came out. But to her credit, she listens to everything and then asks me if we can just get through the day, then after we'd come back we'll talk about everything. Her voice is so tender as she speaks, and I nod with my head, saying yes. She doesn't hold my hand, but she does loop her arm around mine, and we make out way towards where she wants to take me.
As we get out of the bus, I can see just up ahead a hill, and on top of that hill, a cemetery. I ask her if that's where we're going, and she says yes. I hate these places, and I'm already feeling a panic attack coming in. She senses my discomfit, comes close to me, and kisses me softly on the lips. 'Everything will be all right.', she says, and she takes me by the hand, and leads me on up to the graveyard. I follow her, and as we go in, I look straight ahead, trying to focus on anything else but the buried dead. There's a smell to these places that I've always hated, and it's already making me feel queasy. I'm trying real hard not to throw up, not to run away, but she squeezes my hand and says 'We're here.' We've stopped in front of some graves - simple, unornamented graves, but clean and the flowers there seem pretty recent. She points to one, and it reads 'Beloved mother and daughter', and says 'That's my mother, Emm.', then she points to the other, the inscription read 'His memory will live on forever'. My grandfather, Aye'. 'Aye, like the letter I?', I ask, and she just nods. 'He never liked his name, so everyone always called him by the first letter of his name.' I said I understood, though I didn't. 'You must be asking why we're here.', she says, and she's still holding my hand. The full core of my being thanks her for that gesture with immense gratitude. 'I lost my mother when I was very young.' She pauses, and wipes a tear that runs down her face. 'I was five, going on six, and one day we were all having lunch - me, mom and granddad, and she... just... she just turned off. Like a switch went off inside her, and she was gone. Just like that. I can still see her eyes rolling up, and she falling face first on the table.' Jesus christ. I ask her what about her dad, she says he never met him. He'd passed even before she was born, in a fishing accident. 'So after we laid mom to rest, it was my grandfather who took care of me. Here's the best bit about him : he was an avid sci-fi aficionado, and he'd always read to me from his books, then when I learned how to read, I would devour them. And I was constantly asking him weird questions about utopias and dystopias, alternate universes and parallel realities. Now, he wasn't a learned man - he never went to college. But don't get me wrong - he was smart, wicked smart. And he told me that in his youth he'd met a girl who he fell in love with, and she swore up and down that she didn't belong in this world, that she had come from another reality, and things here are extremely similar to where she came from, save for some things she knew couldn't be true. She never had brothers, but here she did. She was dating the love of her life back home, but here he was a stranger to her. She said that she feels alone here, though she has a family that loves her... except their not her family, they just looked like them.' Ess turns to look at me, she's sad, and emotional. 'Do you know who the love of that girl's life was?', she asks. 'No', I nod. 'My grandfather. They got to know each other well, and in time they got married. My mom was born soon after. Then one night, she disappeared. One moment they were together in bed with the baby between them, and the other she was gone. Like she was never here. But she was here, though it wasn't her, it was the one who was here in the first place. One day my grandfather saw her, and went to her. He knew who she was. He asked her if she'd ever met someone who looked like him - and she said yes, and my grandfather told her how he'd met her counterpart. But this woman was a stranger to him, just as the other version of him had been a stranger to her.'
She didn't say much after that, and we began the slow walk back down the hill. I had to ask her if she believed that story. 'I had to.', she said after a while, 'For one, no one seemed to remember who my mother was. I mean my mother, not the girl that looked like her. Also, since then I've been having dreams about another me, living another life, in another reality.', and as she says this, she puts her arm around my waist and says, 'With another you.' We walked in silence until we got to the bus. On our way home, though we were feeling tired and maybe a bit hungry, I tell her that I think I understood what she meant to say, when she told me that story. 'We were given these windows into another existence where we were together, or maybe even multiple iterations of us throughout the infinite multitude of universes, right? And all this time we felt like there was a yawning chasm inside, like there was always something missing, but now we found each other?' She nods, and leans her head on my shoulder. We jump off the bus, and as we start going to her place, she tells me that we shouldn't be together today. 'Go home, go to your place', she says, 'and I'll go to mine's. Right now I need to be alone.' I'm a fair bit taller than her, and she lifted herself higher on the front of her feet and gave me a kiss. 'It's not goodbye, I promise. We'll talk tomorrow.'
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