dear elliot — gloria {✾}

Dear Elliot,

You're as brilliant as ever, aren't you? Always holding the winning hand even as you float between life and death. (And I watch you, and I don't breathe, and I never allow myself more than two minutes to process the trauma of staring at your face and not being able to make you look at me. I have become a ghost in the absence of you.) It seems like you were in on the trick from the very beginning. You've gone and disappeared into your head, and now Six is going up in flames. Again.

I guess it can always get worse. (I go by a different name now. I've pretty much stolen your job. I wear my hair short, and none of my clothes smell like you anymore.) You're safe inside your trophy case, (slowly fading inside your cage,) and would you believe it? Everyone you've left behind now has a plague to juggle with all their other issues. It's a full blown pandemic.

People are dying, Elliot; losing their minds in a matter of days.

(In every tragedy, I am arrogant enough to find traces of us. Because you're slipping away from me, and I'm falling apart without you, with you. We've danced to this song before. I seem to attract calamities in all the ways I've tried to attract you.)

Not that you should worry. (Not that you're able to.) We're well guarded at headquarters, far and away from the quarantine zone and the chaos running rampant in the streets. People from Three and Five are here, too, all cramped together in a pressure cooker. They're trying to burn out the fever, but it's only making things worse. (These days, it's like all I see looking back at me in the mirror are my own mistakes. When I disassemble things, I always fail to put them back together again.) All because of a stupid science fair. Just a few years back, you would have been all over that kind of thing. You'd be right here in the thick of it. I'd have followed you.

But the point is, you're going to wake up one day, (and I'm going to avenge you, and we're going to run,) and I don't know what will be waiting for you. Maybe in a couple years you'll step out of your chamber, and you'll see an entirely different world. Just as damaged as the last one, and just as ill-fated. (I think the longer you're around me, you're dooming yourself to something far worse than the terrible thing you've already endured.) But even if it's a wasteland by then, walk to the forest's edge. Until you reach that wall of dark trees we would stare at as kids.

(All I've ever wanted is to slip in and out of time with you, Elliot.)

I will wait for you there, and we'll go.

Yours,
Eileen (Gloria)