“Let me go,” she whispers, her voice a shattered melody that barely disturbs the air between us. “I don’t belong here. This world—your world…it’s suffocating me.” Her words tremble like autumn leaves clinging to their branches before the inevitable fall. She pulls away from my arms, her touch retreating as though my skin burns hers, leaving phantom scars where her fingertips once rested.
“You belong with me,” I plead, desperation clawing up my throat as I catch her hands in mine. Her skin is cold now, so cold, as though she’s already becoming a ghost. “The world doesn’t matter. None of it does. I love you—God, I love you until it feels like my heart might shatter from the weight of it.”
Her eyes, those impossible eyes that once held galaxies of promise, now glisten with unshed tears. A single drop escapes, trailing down her cheek like liquid starlight, a crystalline testament to everything we’re losing. “It’s not enough,” she breathes, her voice splintering under the crushing weight of truth. She wipes the tear away with trembling fingers, slipping from my grasp like water through desperate hands. “Our love…it’s not enough to bridge the chasm between us. Between your world and mine. Don’t you see? The very laws of existence are crying out against us. You have to let me go.”
Her words tear through me like shrapnel, leaving bleeding wounds where hope once lived. But I can’t—won’t—lose her, not to fate, not to worlds, not to the cruel mathematics of the universe that says we don’t add up.
“I’ll never let you go,” I say, my voice low and steady despite the hurricane raging in my chest. Each heartbeat screams her name, a desperate rhythm I can’t silence. “How could I? You are my everything. The very air I breathe, the light that keeps my darkness at bay. How can I give up the heartbeat that keeps me alive? I don’t care what world you’re from or what cosmic forces stand in our way. Nothing—no force in this universe or any other—is going to separate you from me. Nothing.”
Before she can protest, I pull her into my arms, holding her as though love alone could rewrite the laws of reality. Her warmth bleeds into my chest, our heartbeats thundering against each other like waves crashing on distant shores—similar but never quite in sync, a reminder of the impossible distance we’re trying to bridge.
“I need you,” I whisper into her hair, breathing in the scent that’s become home to me. The scent that whispers of otherworldly gardens and stars I’ll never know. “I need this. Us. Even if it tears the universe apart.”
For one precious, stolen moment, she doesn’t pull away. Her breath catches like a sob in her throat, and I feel her body surrender against mine as though gravity itself has given up its fight. Hope flickers in my chest, fragile as a candle flame in a storm, but burning all the same.
“Don’t ask me to let you go,” I murmur, arms tightening around her as though I could keep her anchored to my world through sheer force of will. “I can’t. I won’t. You’re not just part of me now—you’re written into every cell, every breath, every heartbeat. Letting you go would be like letting go of my very soul.”
I feel her tears now, hot against my neck, each one a testament to the impossible choice before us. Her fingers clutch at my shirt, holding on even as she tries to convince herself to let go.
