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I want to tell you something I’m not supposed to. I don’t know how to begin, but I am telling you anyways, I can’t stand not to tell you anymore.
I suppose it should begin like this. I used to see you, out of the corner of my eye, like you were a ghost. I used to stand alone back in San Francisco and think of you, feel the side of my face burning, then numb. This affliction as well possessed my hands, which lost their usefulness for minutes at a time. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe.
I am thinking of your scars again, I am reminded constantly of Jesus Christ, bringing Thomas’ hand to his side where the arrow had pierced him, the festering wound.
Sometimes I think, if you still had your scars, I would use them to tell you about yourself. I find myself longing for the ability to point to your shoulders and say, these are from out imprisonment on Ekosia, do you remember standing on my back, I wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t shut up. This...Gamma Triangulai...
, you were knocked unconscious three whole times on that away mission. The Galileo incident, where your shin didn’t knit back together quite right, with a sort of notch now under the skin that I could find with my eyes shut. You cut your hand on a rock at Gol. I can trace the side of your palm, where the light green line had been, and do you recall me holding it like this, in the sickbay. I am afraid I have catalogued your cicatrices. I am afraid I don’t know what to do with you now. How to tell you about your wonderful, fantastic life, placing myself within it as I do.
I had thought about taking paint and mixing the tones of your blood, making you lay in front of me as I map out your life. I had thought about showing you the picture after Deneva, when I had realized I had no pictures of Sam. From the bed, with a padd, I remember focusing on you across the room. Your back had been turned, and you had been at the console beside the door to turn someone away, the parasitic scarring half in view on your bare back. I had considered, in a moment of humor, extracting your medical record if I could get away with it, making you read it, hoping that the passive-aggressive scrawlings of our doctor would be enough to trigger something in your mind. Do not disbelieve any longer, but believe. The gospel, suddenly reversed.
We called it re-education, in direct contrast with how we really did deal with the matter. They told us all, over and over, the memories are there. The risk at reintroducing certain, emotionally complex factors into his mind is greater than the personal need to do so. He will remember at his own pace. Our job was to stay silent.
I lost my mind that night you started to remember me, in our house the night after the verdict, when I tried to part ways with you, and you had looked at me like you did when you were thinking very hard about something, the moonlight half on your face, and then you asked if I would kiss you. I wanted to tell you then, so badly, but I couldn’t bring myself to. The single admission, that you knew there was something between us to, brought me back from my own personal death.
I once knew you as closely to my own soul as was possible. I watched you die five feet above my head, for I was not consciously level with your face, but looking up into you as I had spent the rest of the life we shared. When the storms came, I was in San Francisco, listening to a thousand astronauts roar out lamentations for you. I was watching you in the flash of lightning past my windows, your hands trailing across the glass, and I felt your death in my throat, the burns across your skin as if you were inside with me and raking your nails across my face, and I had died with you.
Your scars sit like haze on my eyes, always there under me when I know that they are not. I know that you are back now, that Science had taken her son and burned him to the ground so that he could be remade, and I love the new person you are, whatever the balance is between new and old, the one in my memory and the one before me in afterglow. I will not try again to make you remember that one. You are not any different.
That night after the verdict when the whales had swam in the bay we crashed into, you knew what we were. You stood at the site of your own shattered and broken crucifix, and the look in your clear eyes told me you were always the same person, as you turned your hand against that glass window to brush against where a scar once was, as I often saw you do before the calvary. And in the same way you knew the place over your human heart, and the curved bone of your shin, and the same all across every inch of myself. Everything you lost is in myself.
Now I remember the scars I had not grown to love, and I am glad the burn on your cheek is gone, and I am glad the burns covering your hands are too, the cataracs on your eyes clear. That every time I look at you I am not reminded of the night we lost you, but of the morning we got you back, and I doubted you were still there at all until you proved that you were. I am glad you are not Jesus Christ, raising his wounded hands to the sky before willing himself away once again. I am glad you are not leaving me.
If anything, this is a reminder of that, that something scientific happened on that planet to rebirth you, and that this isn’t some divine, implausible ghost story, this isn’t me standing in San Francisco in front of the windows, and seeing you just as you were, behind some glass panel, and feeling your stigmata on my own body. This is you on the same side, finally, and my hands don’t burn like they used to. There is no chance of me waking up to a universe you no longer inhabit. There is no chance of me letting you hear this, because I know you already know it.