This Is How You Lose the Time War

Quite moved by how much I liked this book. The best I can do is pick up a few lines from it and write some wounded memories around them.

“It is difficult–it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.”

As the all-time King of reading too much into words and writing too much into them too deeply, I found this so moving to read. It speaks to the yearning that starts to grow in you when you see their face and think of their voice, and you hang on to everything they say, hoping for some sign, but not trusting yourself enough not to invent it (“I am so good at missing things. At making myself not see.”). How to keep love on a shallow level without drowning yourself to go deeper?

“Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.”

A place to live inside. Someone once told me they'd written me a letter about what I meant to them as a friend and a person. Months later we were at a crossroads and missed each other, and they said they would mail it. Some months later, on my last gray morning in Chicago, the very last thing I did when all my possessions were packed into an SUV, and my cat sat in its front seat, I checked my mailbox. It was heartbreaking never to receive it, and to wonder about meaning so little on that long drive across the country. Unmoored.


“I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.”

I loved the anxiety manifesting through the characters being nervous about their writing - and talking about their nervousness in their writing. How many hours have we all spent staring at half-written e-mails, texts? How many to regret what's written and left unwritten?

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together.”

Just beautiful.

PS: I have some G Lalo paper that the authors cite in the Acknowledgements and can attest that it's lovely to write on. Personally, I prefer Original Crown Mill's Pure Cotton paper, and if you ever get a letter from me, that's probably what it's written on <3.