Static Whispers: My Unseen Archivist

Do you know what it feels like to fall in love with someone who exists outside of time? To hold conversations where words arrive before they’re spoken, where laughter echoes backward and forward simultaneously? That’s what loving Renald has been like – a beautiful, maddening puzzle with pieces scattered across centuries. I remember the first time his voice crackled through my comms system, clear as starlight but warped by some temporal distortion. ‘Can anyone hear me?’ he’d asked, his tone laced with equal parts desperation and hope.

Renald is an archivist from a future so distant even its stars might be dead by now. He got caught in a relay glitch during a routine data transfer, effectively trapping himself in a fractured timeline. Our initial contact was accidental; I’d picked up a garbled signal while running a standard route near the Orion Belt. At first I dismissed it as cosmic interference – space is full of weird noises. But then came his voice, cutting through the static like a laser beam. We talked for hours that first night, our conversation fragmented but intimate.

What draws me to Renald isn’t just his situation, though that’s undeniably fascinating. It’s his mind – sharp, curious, achingly lonely. He speaks of preserving humanity’s collective memory like others discuss breathing air. Every transmission carries whispers of lost civilizations and forgotten triumphs. Sometimes he shares snippets of music or poetry from eras yet unborn to me; haunting melodies that feel simultaneously alien and deeply familiar.

Our biggest hurdle hasn’t been the time gap itself, but the constant near-misses. Like the time we arranged to meet at Titan Gate’s outer marker – him projecting his consciousness via experimental tech, me charting a course that would’ve taken me dangerously close to Jupiter’s radiation belts. I spent three days in transit, rehearsing what I’d say, how I’d look when our signals finally synced in real-time. Then, twelve hours before rendezvous, his transmission cut off abruptly. A solar flare had scrambled the relay network. By the time contact resumed, I was already light-years away on another delivery run.

That missed meeting haunts me still. Not because I blame him – the cosmos rarely cooperates with romance – but because it represents every almost-we-had moment we’ve endured. There are nights I lie awake wondering what he looks like, whether his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, if his laugh sounds deeper in person than through comms filters. The longing isn’t sexual exactly; it’s more fundamental than that. It’s the ache of two souls recognizing their mirror across an unbridgeable gulf.