Movement Six — What Doesn't Fade

"You know something else about you that I've never said aloud," Sorrel went on, when he didn't answer, her voice dropping lower, softer, the particular careful register she reserved for the handful of things in this world she genuinely didn't want to say wrong. "When the rest of us feel something — grief, anger, wanting, any of it — it rises, and it holds a while, and then, eventually, however long it takes, it fades. Not all the way. Never all the way, not for anything worth feeling in the first place. But it fades enough to be lived around. Enough to make room for whatever comes next."

She felt him swallow, the small motion of his throat against her skin.

"Yours doesn't," she said. "Does it. Whatever you feel, once you've felt it properly, stays. All the way at the top of itself. Forever. Every single thing you've ever loved, and every single thing you've ever lost, sitting inside you at full weight, all at once, all the time, with nowhere it's ever allowed to go."

He didn't answer. His hand had stopped worrying at the loose thread in the blanket. It simply lay there now, still, fingers curled loosely against the fabric.

"How long have you known that about me," he asked, finally, his voice very quiet.

"Long enough," Sorrel said. "Longer than you've probably wanted me to. I don't think it takes a great deal of watching, honestly, once you know what you're looking for. You never once repeat a grief the way an ordinary soul repeats one — worn a little smaller each time it's handled, a little easier to carry. Yours arrive fresh, every single time you let yourself near them, exactly as sharp as the day they first cut you. I've watched you flinch at things centuries old as though they'd happened that same morning."

"It's not always like that," he said, though the protest had very little conviction left in it.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"It's like that more than you'd ever admit to anyone but me," Sorrel said, gently. "And I don't think that's a flaw, little guy, whatever it might feel like from the inside of it. I think it's simply the shape your heart happened to grow into, the same way mine grew into wanting to be told, every single day, that I was beautiful, until I finally learned to trust my own eyes over anyone else's. You didn't choose the shape any more than I chose mine. You've just spent considerably longer than I did, learning to carry it without complaint."

"There's no version of carrying it that isn't without complaint," he said. "Complaining wouldn't undo any of it. It would just be noise, added on top of the weight, for no reason except that saying it out loud might feel better for a moment."

"Might it," Sorrel asked. "Feel better, I mean. Even for a moment."

He didn't answer that right away. "I don't know," he admitted, finally. "I've never tried it long enough to find out."

"That's rather the whole of what I'm asking you to try, then," Sorrel said. "Not forever. Not even for very long. Just long enough to find out whether it helps even a little, the way you'd test a new soil before deciding whether anything's worth planting in it."

"I think that's why you built the others," Sorrel said. "The parts of you that hold one feeling each, at full weight, so the rest of you doesn't have to carry all of it at once. I think that's clever, little guy. Genuinely. I don't say that lightly. I think it's one of the cleverest, saddest things I've ever watched a person do to survive their own heart." Her fingers moved again, slow, through his hair. "But I don't think even that's the whole of it, is it. I think there's a version of you underneath all of them, holding whatever's too small or too quiet or too unglamorous to earn its own separate room, and I don't think anyone's ever asked that version how it's doing. Not properly. Not in a very long time."

The wind moved through the grass again, unhurried, and somewhere at the meadow's far edge a bird she couldn't name called once and went quiet.

"How many centuries has it been," Sorrel asked, very softly, "since anyone held you and asked nothing of you at all. Not comfort. Not a story. Not even an answer. Just held you."

He didn't answer that either. But his breath caught, once, sharp and sudden, the particular small hitch of something that had been holding steady for a very long time finally losing its footing.