To Forget and Be Forgotten

I didn't sleep well.

That wasn't new. Sleep had never been something I was particularly good at - too many years of light rest, one ear always toward the door, body never fully convinced that stillness was safe.

But this was different.

This was the ceiling of Clara's spare room at two in the morning, completely awake, thinking about a sentence.

Why don't you stay with me.

I had turned it over approximately forty times since we walked back from the river. Examined it from different angles the way you examine a wound - not to understand what caused it but to understand how deep it went.

It went fairly deep.

I knew what she meant. That wasn't the problem. Clara didn't say things she didn't mean and she didn't mean things halfway. When she said she liked me-

I stopped that thought where it was.

The problem wasn't understanding what she said.

The problem was what happened in my chest when she said it.

I was not inexperienced with loss. I understood grief the way you understand a language you've spoken for years - fluently, automatically, without thinking about the grammar of it. I knew what it felt like when something ended.

What I didn't know - what I had been carefully not learning for a very long time — was what it felt like when something began.

Liora had been different.

I had grown into those feelings gradually, without choosing them consciously. They had just become true somewhere along the way.

This felt different.

This felt like something I could see arriving from a distance and still not manage to step out of the way of.

I sat up in the dark.

The cottage was quiet. Clara's room was down the short hall. I looked at my hands.

Three months ago these hands had-

I looked away.

Outside, the sky was the deep blue that came just before dawn. Not dark anymore. Not light yet. The particular hour that belonged to neither.

I had been running since that morning. Not always literally. But moving - always toward the next thing, the next reason not to stop. Stopping meant thinking. Thinking meant remembering.

Clara didn't flinch.

That was the thing about her. Most people, when they spent enough time near me, developed a careful distance. Something in them recognized - even without knowing what I was - that proximity had a cost. They pulled back gradually. Naturally.

Clara had moved closer and then said I like you like it was a practical observation about the weather.

The feeling in my chest didn't have a name I recognized.

It wasn't grief. I knew grief. This was grief's mirror image - just as heavy, just as disorienting, sitting in the same place but pushing outward instead of in.

I thought about the north. Empty roads. Cold air. Anonymity. I had done it before. It was the most rational option by every measure.

I thought about east. Smaller villages. Easier disappearance.

Both reasonable. Both correct.

Both completely impossible to picture now in a way they hadn't been two days ago.

I thought about the curse.

I thought about it the way you think about a fire you're standing near - carefully, from a distance. It was there. It was real. It had taken something from me once and it would take something again if I gave it the opportunity.

That was the argument.

The argument was sound.

And I sat in the dark and made myself look at it directly - the argument, the fire, the cost - and then made myself look at the other thing too.

The fishing line coming up empty.

Burned breakfast.

Why don't you stay with me.

I walked to the window.

The village was still asleep below. Rooftops and paths and the distant suggestion of the tree line where the river was.

I stood there for a long time.

I didn't have an answer yet.

But when I tried to picture the north road - the empty, rational, correct north road - I couldn't make it feel real anymore.

And when I tried to picture this window at this hour-

That felt entirely too real.

I stayed at the window until the sky finished deciding to become morning.

And I didn't look away.