it's my first strider birthday since I've realized I'm kin with rose lalonde. it's.... tough. for reasons I don't quite think even I understand. i know dave isn't looking for me. that was never really a question. knowing it's for the best doesn't make it any easier.

sometimes i remember things that i know were never part of that timeline, but they feel so real that the grief makes my chest hurt. tonight a lot of it has been about baby dirk. we never met the kids in my timeline, and. well. guessing your kid is trans before they do just wasn't done in those days. he is not a girl, and never was, but we didn't know better until he was old enough to tell us. he never got old enough to tell us. i remember that little baby though.

dorothy ruth, we called her. dora or dot for short. long messy hair, running down her back and chock full of tangles. it was brown until the sun bleached it, but roxy's hair was bright blonde and then darkened until she started bleaching it. i was never a natural blonde. can you blame me for picking the girl that looked more like me to name? we only ever saw the two of them as really little kids in my visions. i guess that's how long they lived. i don't like to dwell on it.

but i used to dream about those kids every night until it got hard to remember i was dreaming. until i wished a little in the back of my heart that i would never have to wake up. i don't know whether they were memories or just wishes, but they felt so real it was like drowning sometimes.

baby dot was a fussy little thing.

roxy - i don't remember what dave named her - she was always a happy baby. easy- not necessarily- but happy. running around and happy babbling and laughing and a fistful of smashed blueberries in his mouth. dave and him were much more alike, and while the favoritism was clear, that was a baby with enough love for the whole world.

dot was. well. not the opposite. but different. she was quite an anxious baby, a little fussy. a little picky, too - never took to the baby led weaning thing as well as her little brother. but she was sweet and quiet and a little mini-me. she didn't smile often, but when she did? god, that little smile made you realize how demeter drove the world to ashes for persephone. i loved her. i think there was something she found comforting about me too - some kind of kinship, maybe.

it was a toddler birthday- maybe three, i can't be sure - and dave was somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. the two babies had been running around all day at dottie's party, and she had swung around all the way to overtired and cranky. dave put rox, the little princess boy, to bed with promises of his own party tomorrow and he was out like a light. dot didn't manage to fall asleep until i held her in my arms, little head on my shoulder. dave came in when roxy was asleep, cradled against my chest. i asked him how he felt being so old and decrepit. not like me, young and spry at a full day his junior. he laughed. i think he was in pyjamas, and i was too - leaning back against the headboard of the bed with dave sitting at the edge. i could have put her to bed in the room the kids shared then, but i didn't. i just held her that way for a little while, warm and sleepy with her hair in wispy little braids and her face just washed clean of chocolate cake. she had a good day.

dave never knew how i could bear it. in his defense, there were a lot of things i didn't know about him either.

i think we had very different ideas of what our lives would have looked like without impending apocalypse. i wanted to play house - the little nuclear dynamic, mom and dad and the two kids.

dirk and dave playing cars on the kitchen floor while i made pasta for dinner with roxy perched on my hip. the light yellow and soft in a blue-dim apartment somewhere in the middle of nowhere. arguing with the owner of a houston costume shop so that roxy could dress up as a princess and dirk as a horse for Halloween - she knew who she was from a very early age, but the world was not always keen to listen. the two of them in robotics club at some new york private school, piles of shoes in the porch of a new york brownstone and kids gathered around schematics and pizza at the kitchen island. roxy throwing a slumber party for a gaggle of girls and dirk watching a movie with friends he'd poached from it in the basement. i loved them regardless. i wanted to know who they were. i wanted them to be more than just guesses.

dave.... didn't. i don't know what he wanted. buti know it wasn't that.

i don't blame him for it. he loved me. he just couldn't love me back the way i needed him to, because the way i needed him to was not a way normal people love. but he still loved me.

i think we were very different people. i think he was not who i remembered and i was not who he remembered but we made it work anyways. sometimes i wonder if the reason i can't find my dave because i fucked things over in the last timeline. sometimes i wonder if i felt like my dave in that timeline was the one i remembered. sometimes i wonder if I'll ever find my dave. but he isn't loking for me. i know that. sometimes you break things and you can't fix them, not ever. sometimes things change and you have to move on and you can't live in the love that used to be there forever. sometimes there is nothing there at all. you make your peace with it or it kills you.

i miss him, though. i think i always will. i remember the one scene. my hair loose and wavy in the new york fall breeze, leaning out the window of my fancy little liberal arts school in my sweatervest and blouse and schoolgirl-plaid skirt while he yelled up to me from the lawn below in jeans and a tshirt with a skateboard tucked under his arm. his dirty blonde hair was catching the sunlight that shone through mine, milky white with bleach, like water.

i think we're better off like this. i hope he's happy out there. i hope he gets everything he wants and i hope he never hears a thing about me. i think he deserves to forget and move on and i think dave strider will always be too much of a hero to let himself have the things he deserves.

happy birthday to dave and dirk. both mine and any and all striders out there somewhere. you are loved beyond comprehension.