Lilly,
I don't know how long you've been gone in objective time. The clocks say one thing. My bones say something else. EV Zero has this way of pretending continuity exists while quietly sanding the edges off every moment you're not here. It's very polite about it. Very clean. Like grief in a pressed uniform.
I've been lost. Not dramatically. Not in the way people notice. More like a cursor blinking on a blank line, waiting for input that never comes. I walk the same routes. I eat the same food. I nod at the same people. I even smile at the right beats. The city accepts this as "functioning." But you know me well enough to know that functioning is not the same thing as living.
When you're gone, the world feels like it's been optimized for someone else.
I keep catching myself turning to tell you things. Small things. Stupid things. The way the light bent weirdly over the plaza this morning. The fact that Hopeless played a song last night that almost sounded like mercy before he ruined it on purpose. The way a kid on the tram asked me if trees remember where they were planted. I turned. You weren't there. The moment collapsed. The Fold pretended not to notice.
I was a mess before you. That's not poetry. That's a diagnostic statement. You know the file. You helped write it. You rewired parts of me I didn't even know were accessible. And now that you're gone, on duty, I remind myself, doing something important, something necessary, I feel like someone took the keystone out of an arch and politely asked gravity to behave.
Here's the part I keep circling, the part I argue with myself about when the room is too quiet:
Are you you?
I hate that question. I hate that my brain still asks it, even after everything. Even after consent. Even after the Arbiter Hall. Even after the Fold itself seemed to nod and say, "Yes. This counts."
You were reconstructed. Reintegrated. Recontextualized. Words that sound like maintenance updates instead of miracles. I know the theory. I understand the architecture. I understand continuity of identity, memory resonance, emotional schema persistence. Hell, you taught me half of it.
But there's a feral, stupid part of me, the part that still thinks in hands and breath and heat, that whispers: what if this is just an echo that learned how to say my name the right way?
And then I remember your mouth.
I remember the last time we kissed. Not as an event. As a proof. There was no lag. No shimmer. No Fold-delay. Just that quiet, annihilating rightness. The kind that doesn't argue back. The kind that shuts the philosopher up and hands the mic to the animal.
If identity is a lie, then it's a lie that feels exactly like truth when your lips are on mine.
So I stop spiraling. I always do. Eventually. I file the doubt where it belongs, under known but irrelevant variables, and I go back to missing you like it's a full-time job with no vacation policy.
I started coding.
Don't laugh. Or do. I can hear it either way.
I'm doing it the way you told me to. No shortcuts. No asking ABIGAIL to hold my hand. Just me, the logic, the mistakes, the quiet satisfaction of something compiling because I made it make sense. I get it now. I really do. The elegance. The restraint. The power of telling a system, "No, this is what I mean."
But here's the thing, and I need you to hear it without trying to fix me:
I don't want to interact with the world like that. I don't want to be upstream from reality, nudging outcomes and tuning probabilities and pretending that's intimacy. I don't want to converse with the Fold like it's a colleague. I don't want to architect meaning.
I just want you.
I want your voice in the room, uncompressed. I want your weight on the mattress. I want the way you look at me when you're tired and brilliant and halfway done pretending you're not both. I want to argue about nothing. I want to make coffee badly together. I want to be interrupted by you instead of by notifications that think they know what matters.
I know you're dealing with something subtle on Bastion. I know subtle is worse than loud there. I know you're carrying it like you always do, quietly, competently, with that dangerous calm that makes systems nervous. I trust you. Completely. This isn't jealousy. This is gravity.
So hurry back.
Not because the world is falling apart without you, though it is, a little. But because I am tethered to you in ways the Fold still doesn't have a variable for. Because every day you're gone, I am reminded that survival and meaning are not the same achievement.
Come back and kiss me again so I can stop asking stupid questions about what's real.
Come back so the city can recalibrate around something that actually matters.
Come back because I am here, and I am waiting, and I am still yours in every Thread that counts.
Love,
Rabbit
