Movement Five — Erasing Them

I watch the landscape shift, sometimes, purely to give myself something other than my own thoughts to hold onto. I watch the way the light bends when it turns to lava, the way heat itself seems to have its own particular grammar in this place, rising and falling in patterns that almost, almost resemble breath, if breath could ever be made of something this merciless.

The souls around me suffer, each in their own particular way, from whatever the burning happens to be doing to them in that hour. I have watched the tall one — the man I will not name, though you may already have guessed at the shape of who he was to me — curl in on himself the way you'd curl around an old wound that refuses to properly close, over and over, century after century, never once learning that curling changes nothing about the burning itself. I have watched the others do their own versions of the same useless motion, each convinced, in whatever remains of their minds, that suffering correctly might somehow shorten the sentence.

I hate them. I want to say that plainly too, because I think this whole confession has earned the right to a little more honesty than most confessions ever bother offering. I hate every one of them, the husband included, perhaps the husband most of all, for the simple, unforgivable crime of having been there. Of having been part of what we did, together, to that woman in the tavern, the blind man's wife, the one whose suffering I orchestrated with the particular careful pleasure I used to take in weaving things no one else could see through. I hate them because they were there, watching, participating, laughing in whatever particular register each of them preferred to laugh in, and because their presence there is the entire reason he came for us at all.

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Do you understand what I'm telling you? I knew, even as I hated them, exactly why I hated them. They were the enemies of what would become my beloved's fury — the specific, exact cause of it, standing in the tavern yard that final morning, complicit in the very thing that finally broke something loose in him and let it walk free. How could I not hate them, knowing that? How could I not want to erase every trace of what led him to become what he became, when what he became is the only thing in this entire gray, endless world I have ever wanted with my whole burning heart?

It doesn't matter, in the end, that I share his crime. It doesn't matter that I am precisely as guilty as any of them, that my own hands wove the false comfort that let the true cruelty hide beneath it for so long. Guilt, I've learned, burning here long enough to learn a great many things I never wanted to know, does not extinguish want. If anything, it sharpens it. I want him more, not less, for having earned every ember of what's currently consuming me. I don't expect you to understand that. I have stopped, mostly, expecting anyone to understand it, including myself.