Movement Twelve — The Other Girl in Another Prison

I loved him deeply. I want to say it one final time, plainly, before whatever remains of this confession runs out of road. And I was not, I think, the only one loving him that way, from somewhere no one was ever meant to see.

There is another girl — I don't know her name either, though I have caught, in the thin places, enough of her shape to understand something of who she is. She waits, in some far corner of another prison entirely, a gentler one than mine, I suspect, built from ordinary stone rather than undying fire, holding a soul who never once did what I did, who was simply unlucky enough to share blood with someone ambitious and cruel. She waits for the day her own dream might come true, the same impossible, hopeless shape of dream I've been confessing to you this whole telling, and I don't think either of us has any real reason to believe the waiting will end the way we want it to.

She couldn't cry, that girl. I want to end this particular thread with that detail, because I think it says more than any of the rest of what I've told you. Whatever she carries, whatever ache sits behind that dry, careful humor I've heard drifting faintly from her corner of the Between, she has decided, somewhere along the way, not to let it show as tears. She was a big girl, in whatever sense that phrase carries the most weight. She'd endure it properly, the way you endure something you've already accepted isn't going to be handed to you on any schedule you control.

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I envy her, a little, though I have no right to. Her prison has walls that might, someday, open. Mine has none. Her guilt, if she carries any at all, is not truly hers — only an accident of blood, a wrong turn of proximity, nothing she chose the way I chose every single cruelty that led me here. And yet we are, in the end, doing the very same thing, from our two separate corners of this vast, unfair world — loving a man who may never once look back, and calling that love, however foolishly, however hopelessly, the only reason either of us has left to keep existing at all.