Movement Seven — Every Soul, Asking the Same Question

I want you to understand something about who I was, back then, I told them, because I don't think the rest of this makes any sense without it.

I didn't know what beautiful meant. I want to say that as plainly as I possibly can, because I think it's easy, hearing a story like this told from a distance, to assume some quieter wisdom on my part that simply wasn't there yet. I didn't know handsome, either, or plain, or striking, or any of the small careful gradations a mortal life spends decades teaching a person to sort each face into. I didn't know strong from weak. I didn't know, if I'm honest, very much of anything at all beyond the shape of roots and the particular patience required of something that has spent an age of the universe simply standing still, waiting for whatever the sky decided to give it. Words like beautiful arrived to me the way an entirely foreign language arrives to a traveler with no map and no dictionary — sounds, mostly, attached to some vague feeling of importance that I hadn't yet learned to properly translate into anything I could use.

So — and here is the question I want you to sit with, the way I sat with it myself back then — what does a soul like that say, when a stranger arrives every single day and asks her, with an intensity that made the asking itself feel like a wound reopening, whether she was the most beautiful thing he had ever encountered?

I tightened my arm around Vesper as I said this, feeling her still watching me with something sharper than simple curiosity now, and reached with my other arm to draw Iris in a little closer against my side, where she'd been leaning, quiet and patient, this whole time.

What I believed, back then, I told them, was that every soul was identical. Not in the ordinary sense, the sense a person might mean when they say two things look alike — I mean it more completely than that. I believed the beauty of one soul was, quite literally, the same as the beauty of any other, the way a child believes it, before the world has finished teaching that child all its careful, cruel distinctions. Everyone beautiful. Or everyone plain. It made no difference to me which word you chose, because in my own understanding, back then, the two words simply hadn't finished separating from each other yet. I remember, if memory is even the right word for something this old and this formless, a kind of flat and total equality sitting behind everything I looked at — no soul rising above another, no soul falling below, the whole gray field of them simply existing, side by side, in a fairness I hadn't yet learned to call fairness because I hadn't yet learned that anything else was possible.

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I think, looking back on it now, that there was something almost merciful in my own ignorance, however unearned that mercy actually was. A child doesn't compliment another child's face out of any deliberate kindness. It simply hasn't yet learned that faces are meant to be ranked at all, and so it moves through a world entirely unburdened by comparison, offering the same wide, uncomplicated warmth to everyone it meets. I was something very close to that, back then — not innocent in any moral sense, I don't think innocence and morality are quite the same thing, but simply unfinished, still growing into whatever understanding I'd eventually arrive at, and finding, along the way, that my unfinished state had accidentally become a kind of gift to someone who badly needed exactly that particular flatness in order to finally rest.

And for a soul like her — I want to be careful here, because I think this is the part that actually matters — a soul whose entire remaining hunger was built around extracting that specific feeling of validation, that particular burn in the chest that comes from being recognized, singled out, named the most beautiful thing in an entire universe, my flat, undifferentiated answer should have been the cruelest thing anyone could have handed her. It should have starved her further, confirmed the very thing she was most afraid of — that she was, in the end, no different from anyone else, unremarkable, unrankable, lost inside a crowd of equally unremarkable shapes. Instead — and I still don't fully understand why, even now, even after everything that followed — it did something else entirely.

I've turned that particular mystery over more times than I could count, in the centuries since, trying to work out precisely which part of my ignorance managed to land as mercy instead of insult. I think, in the end, it must have been the total absence of hesitation in it. A crueler soul, given the same flat equality I carried, might have delivered it as a cutting remark — you are no more beautiful than anyone else, spoken the way you'd spoken to wound. I never once considered the possibility of wounding her with it, because I hadn't yet learned that words could be sharpened at all. What she received, instead of an insult dressed as fact, was simply a fact, offered without any edge attached to it whatsoever — and perhaps, for a soul who had spent so long being ranked and measured and found wanting, an answer with no edge in it at all was itself the rarest thing she'd been offered in longer than she could remember.