The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Vaelira shares this future with me. I have written that already, a few lines above, but I want to write it again, more slowly this time, because I think the fact of it deserves more care than I gave it the first pass.

She was there too, in whatever vision first showed me the life I did not choose — beside the same man, in several of its branching threads, across several different unlived versions of a future neither of us will ever get to properly grieve. I remember the particular shock of first recognizing her there, in a vision meant, I had assumed, to be mine alone — the way you might recognize a familiar face in a crowd you expected to be full of strangers. I do not know what that means about the two of us, about whatever old thread once ran between us in some life neither of us fully remembers now. I have never asked her directly. She has never offered the answer unprompted either, which tells me, I think, that she is carrying the same reluctance I am — the particular fear that speaking a shared vision aloud makes it more real, rather than less, and that silence, however lonely, is at least a silence we've both agreed to keep together.

There are evenings when I catch her studying me across some ordinary domestic scene — mending, or reading, or simply lying in the grass with her eyes half-closed in that lazy, cat-like way of hers — and I understand, without either of us saying a word, that we are both thinking of the same unlived life. We have never once compared notes on it properly. We circle it in conversation the way two dancers circle a step neither of them wants to be the first to take, each waiting for the other to lead.

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She asked me once — carefully, sideways, the way she asks most things she actually cares about the answer to — whether I regretted my life as it currently stands. I told her I did not. I want to write, here, in the privacy of my own hand, that this was not entirely honest. There are nights — this is one of them, if I am being truthful with myself the way I promised myself I would be tonight — where I feel a quiet, private ache for the life I did not have. The ordinary one. The one where growing old beside someone was simply a fact of living rather than an impossibility built into the very architecture of what I've become. I imagine it sometimes, in the particular idle way you imagine a road you never took — a modest house, perhaps, somewhere with actual seasons, a man whose face I can never quite hold steady in the imagining, children whose faces I hold even less steady than his. I do not know whether staying, choosing Eremos over whatever gentler, more ordinary future once waited for me in some other unlived thread, was the correct choice. I have never known. I suspect I never will.