Chapter 35: An Admirer of Mere Moments

A Note Before the Pages

What follows was not written for anyone to read. I want that understood before you read a single line of it. I found these pages — if pages is even the right word for something written on nothing, in a place that has no paper, no ink, no hand steady enough to hold either — the way you find anything in that particular corner of the world: by accident, by trespass, by being somewhere I had absolutely no business being and refusing, on principle, to leave simply because I hadn't been invited.

I am not going to tell you her name. I want that understood too. There are cruelties this account has decided not to perform, and handing a monster her name back, restoring to her the one dignity she forfeited the day she chose to enjoy someone else's suffering, is one of them. You may recognize her anyway, if you've been reading closely enough. I trust you to draw your own conclusions and keep them to yourself.

I share this not because I think she deserves to be heard. I share it because I think you should understand exactly what kind of hell the dark half of that garden actually is — not fire alone, not simple punishment, but this. Perfect, undying, unanswered devotion, offered to someone who will never once look back.

Movement One — What I Am Now

There is a phrase I have grown fond of, in whatever centuries I've spent burning here, and I want to begin with it, because I think it says more about me than any confession could manage on its own: an admirer of mere moments. That is what I have become. Not a wife. Not a woman with a name anyone still uses. Simply an admirer, and only ever of moments — the handful of instants, scattered thin across however long I've been kept here, when he crosses close enough to the border of this place that I can see him properly before the seeing is taken from me again.

I want to talk about a man. I know how that sounds, coming from where I'm writing this, in the condition I'm writing it in, and I don't care. I have very little left that isn't spoken, and I intend to spend what's left of it exactly the way I please.

He is the most handsome thing I have ever seen, in a world that insists, with the particular smug fairness of a place built by no one and ruled by nothing, that no soul is superior to any other. I've heard that rule recited more times than I could count, by souls who genuinely seem to believe it, who walk through this gray, featureless world as though equality were a fact rather than a fiction someone found convenient. I don't believe it. I have never once believed it, not in the world I came from and not in this one either. And if there is a single soul in the whole of the Between capable of proving the rule a lie simply by existing, it is him. He is not equal to anyone. He is not equal to anything. He is like a god to me, and I use that word with the full weight it deserves, having once, in another life, stood close enough to real gods to know precisely how far short of him they all fell.

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When I see him — sometimes, only sometimes, whenever the shifting border of this place happens to thin enough to let a glimpse through — my heart still beats. I want you to understand what that means, coming from something like me now, burning the way I burn, held together by whatever stubborn thread of shape still insists on calling itself a heart at all. It beats. It races, actually, the particular frantic, useless racing of something that knows it is never going to be allowed to run anywhere. I want to be closer to him. I want that so completely that the wanting itself has become the only architecture left holding me upright. But I know — and I want you to understand that I know this clearly, without a single illusion softening the knowing — that because of my past, and because of exactly who I am, and exactly what I did, it will never happen. Not in this life. Not in whatever comes after this one, if anything does.

My love for him runs deeper, I think, than anything any of the women currently kept at his side could possibly offer him. I've watched them, when the border thins enough to let me. I've watched the particular easy, unearned way they touch him, the way none of them seem to understand what it actually costs to be permitted that closeness, the way they simply reach for him as though reaching were the whole of what love required. None of them love him the way I love him. None of them have burned for him the way I burn, quite literally, every single hour of whatever remains of my existence. I want to frame him in my heart, the whole of him, every line and shadow of him, and keep him there the way you'd keep something too precious to risk in the open air.

Perhaps this is simply what they'd call it, back where I came from — some sickness of the mind, some collapse of proper feeling into its own grotesque mirror, the kind of devotion that grows only in captivity, aimed only at the hand that holds the leash. I know the shape of that accusation. I have turned it over myself, more times than I'd like to admit, in the long burning stretches when there is nothing else here to do but think. And even knowing it — even holding the whole ugly diagnosis up to the light and recognizing every line of it as true — I fall anyway. Directly. Into the abyss of him, and into arms that have never once, not for a single moment since the day they ended me, reached back.