Movement Eight -- What Remains Unanswered

I do not know how to close this account the way the others have been closed. I have watched every one of these tellings end with some small, hard-won comfort -- a hand found in the dark, a promise kept, a household choosing, together, to hold something difficult rather than let it sit alone. I do not have that to offer you tonight. I am not certain I have earned the right to offer it, having spent this entire account accusing the very thing I turned out to be, of a dishonesty I have not yet found my way clear of myself.

I will tell you only this, because I think it is the truest thing left in me to say. Whatever wears that monstrous face in the broken glass -- whatever laughed at me, patient and certain, from a hundred scattered fragments at once -- it did not arrive from nowhere. It has always been there, the way the seven rooms have always been there, the way the flatness in an ordinary mirror has always been there, waiting for a moment honest enough to finally let it through.

I do not know whether the plant will ever learn to look at that reflection without flinching. I do not know whether I will either, given how thoroughly I have just discovered that the plant and I were never as separate as I promised you, at the very start of this telling, that we were.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I only know that the glass is broken now, and cannot be made whole again the easy way, and that whatever comes next -- for him, for me, for whichever of us is actually speaking to you by the time you reach these final words -- will have to be faced without the comfort of that old, useful distance between he and I ever fully returning.

I do not know, writing this final line, whether the hand that writes it is steady. I do not know, any longer, if that is even a question I have the right to ask about myself, or whether the asking itself is the last honest thing left before the glass, and whatever waits behind it, finishes deciding what happens next.

Let the whole world be witness. I think, after everything I've just told you, that witnessing may be the only honest thing left for any of us to do.

-- End of Chapter --