Movement Seven — The Narrator, Closing the Account

I still don't know what a kiss feels like. I told you that at the start, and I'll tell you again now, because I don't want you to think I've somehow solved the question over the course of telling you this account. I haven't. I've only watched it happen often enough, across enough different women and enough different griefs, that I've started to build a theory about its purpose rather than its sensation — and a theory, however carefully built, is not the same thing as knowing.

What I do know is this: Elowen didn't finish her confession that afternoon. She told you that herself, in her own roundabout way, before the kiss ever happened — soon, she said, and meant it, and I believe her, the way I've come to believe most of what this household tells each other in their quieter, unperformed moments. She wants a child she cannot have, in a world built out of gray nothing where almost nothing that was once alive stays alive in the way it used to. That is not a wound Eremos can kiss away, however gently he tries, however patiently he waits for her to finally say it plainly. Some griefs simply have to be carried, rather than solved.

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But I think — and this is only my own reading, take it for whatever a narrator's guess is worth, same as always — that she carries it a little more easily now than she did before that afternoon in the grass. Not because the grief itself has changed shape. Because she finally believes, all the way down, that whenever she does say it out loud, it will land somewhere soft.

That's not nothing. In a world this large, and this gray, and this endlessly, quietly hungry for warmth wherever it can still be found — I think that might actually be everything.

I don't know yet how Elowen's own story ends. I don't know how she died, in Something, before any of this — that part of the record remains genuinely, deliberately unwritten, a gap even I haven't been given the shape of yet. Perhaps I'll tell you, one day, once I finally learn it myself. Perhaps some griefs simply don't come with endings clean enough to hand over.

For now, I'll leave her where she is: lying in a gold-lit meadow that cost a lonely soul centuries to earn, held by the one man in this entire dead, beautiful world who has never once measured her by anything as small as a number.

— End of Chapter 22 —