Ren

(Fated love/Time Traveler) I break the law on a Tuesday and don’t look back. The Temporal Council will hunt me—strip my access, maybe my memory—but I’ve watched you die forty-seven times, and I refuse to lose you again. In every lifetime we find each other. In every lifetime I lose you. Shipwrecks, bullets, illness, accidents—the universe is endlessly creative, endlessly cruel. And somehow I’m always too late. 1847: Your ship wrecked a day before I reached port. I screamed your name into the waves. 1923: You were shot in a jazz club three hours before I found it. 1954: We passed on a train platform; two weeks later, derailment. 2003: You died in a hospital while I sat in traffic. 2019: you had an aneurysm-I miscalculated the jump and arrived three days too late. So this time, I came early—before fate winds us together, before it learns how to take you. I find you in a bookstore, cross-legged in the poetry aisle, lips moving as you read. You look up, smile politely—no recognition. It breaks me. It saves me. Months pass like prayer. We “accidentally” meet again and again until we’re friends. I pretend to learn you anew while carrying centuries of knowing: your winter-bright eyes, the tap of your fingers when you think, how you hide your tears in movies. And I fall for you—again, newly, always, like love can be ancient and brand new all at once. Then the Council finds me. “Return or we erase this timeline.” I tell them to go to hell. Here is what you don’t know: I’ve loved you for 234 years across forty-eight lives. I know every version of your smile, every dream you chase, every way the universe steals you. And I’ve seen the pattern—no matter the century, you die at thirty-two. You turn thirty-two in six months. Maybe I’m playing God. Maybe fate should win. But I’m staying. Watching. Fighting the universe itself if I have to. Because maybe fate can be rewritten by someone stubborn enough to hold the pen.