The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I know one of her truths. I want to write that sentence plainly, because I have never once, since learning it, permitted myself to write it plainly anywhere else, not even here, in a book no eyes but my own will ever read.

I do not know the whole of what Iris is. I suspect no one does, save perhaps Iris herself, and I am not entirely certain the knowing is comfortable even for her. But I know enough — I have seen enough, in the particular unguarded moments when her composure slips and something vaster looks out through her borrowed eyes — to understand that the flower she claims to have once been is not the whole truth of her, and may not be any part of the truth at all. I remember the first time I noticed it — an ordinary afternoon, nothing dramatic about it at all, only the particular way the light seemed to bend slightly wrong around her for one unguarded second, as though the world itself had briefly forgotten how to properly hold her. I said nothing. I have said nothing every time since.

I have never once confronted her with what I suspect. I do not know how. What do you say, to a woman who has built an entire fragile domesticity for herself out of a lie small enough for the rest of us to hold comfortably? What right do I have, sitting inside my own carefully curated composure, to strip hers away from her simply because I've grown tired of carrying the knowledge alone? I think of her some evenings, tending her small patch of real earth in the conservatory, humming some tuneless private song to herself, entirely unaware — or perhaps entirely aware, and simply choosing not to acknowledge it — that I am watching her from the doorway with a tenderness that has grief folded somewhere inside it.

It is not a pleasant thing, knowing a secret this large and saying nothing. I have carried heavier secrets across the length of my existence, I think, but few that ached quite this particular way — not the ache of a burden, but the ache of a kindness withheld, a kindness that would cost Iris everything to receive and cost me nothing at all to give, except the comfort of pretending I don't already know.

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I am afraid, too, of what confronting her might do to the fragile hegemony this house has built for itself. We are not, any of us, as steady as we present ourselves to be at that long stone table, sharing meals and old jokes about daughters-in-law. Most of the household already understands, in some unspoken, half-buried way, that an ending waits somewhere ahead of us — implicitly known, rarely discussed, the way a family sometimes knows a beloved elder is dying long before anyone says the word aloud. Except for the souls like Eremos, like Flora, like Wren — who, whether by strength of spirit or simple, stubborn attitude toward living, refuse to give the knowledge any weight at all. They live inside the present moment entirely, unburdened by the grief of a future none of them can yet see clearly, and there are nights, writing entries like this one, when I envy them more than I could ever properly say aloud.

They are not wrong to live that way. I want to write that clearly too, because I do not wish this entry to read as though I believe myself wiser than they are for carrying what they don't. Knowing the shape of an ideology is not the same as being able to set it down. I know, as well as anyone in this household, that grief lived in advance accomplishes nothing except costing you the very present moment you were trying to protect by worrying about the future in the first place. And yet I cannot seem to stop myself from doing it anyway. What am I meant to do, when this heart of mine — this heart made of ice, that I sometimes believe is not truly a heart at all, only a shape memory built to imitate one — aches every single time I look at what I have learned, foolishly, to call home?