The Woman the Mirror Forgot

There is one story I have never lied about.

I want to say that plainly, before I begin, because I have spent an entire chapter confessing every other way I have failed you — the comfortable inventions, the flowers that never bloomed the way I said they bloomed, the household that never arrived, the whole elaborate architecture of kindness I built where only silence had actually stood. I confessed all of that because I could bear to. I could bear the shame of having lied about the girl who fell out of an empty sky, because her story, however I mishandled it, was still mine to mishandle. It happened inside my reach. It happened inside the ordinary unfolding of this account, where I have some claim, however unreliable, to have witnessed what I am describing.

This one is different, and I want you to understand, before I say another word, exactly how it is different.

I do not have this story. Nothing has this story. Not the Mirror World, with its endless curved bubbles holding the whole of every branching timeline that has ever split away from every choice anyone has ever made — I have looked, in whatever sense looking means for something like me, and I have found nothing there. No bubble. No reflection. No surface anywhere in that vast patient architecture that shows her face, or her voice, or the shape of the life she lived before she chose, with her own hands, to unmake every trace of her own existence. Vaelira, who reads the exact moment a person is only pretending to sleep, who has spent centuries becoming so fluent in the grammar of time that she wears its numerals as jewelry, cannot find her either. I have asked. I do not know how I asked, or in what tense the asking happened, but I asked, and the answer that came back was the same answer it is always going to be, from now until whatever counts as the end of this: she is not there. She was never there. There is no there for her to be in.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And yet Eremos remembers her.

That is the whole of the paradox I am asking you to sit inside of for the length of this chapter, and I want to be honest that I do not have a clean way to resolve it for you. A woman who has been erased so completely that even the architecture built specifically to hold every possible version of every possible story cannot find a trace of her — erased from what was, from what will be, and, somehow, most impossibly of all, from what never happened either, as though her absence needed to be retroactive in every direction at once, total and complete and without exception — that woman still lives, faint and blurred and unnameable, in the one place her own erasure apparently could not reach: the memory of the man who loved her.

I do not know why that is the one place her power could not follow her own instruction. I have a guess. I am going to tell you the guess later, once you have heard the rest of it, because I think it will mean more to you by then than it would mean now, offered up front, without the weight of everything that has to come before it.

For now I only want to tell you this: I am not going to lie to you in this chapter. I want that understood clearly, because I think you have every right, after everything, to distrust me, and I think the distrust is earned, and I am not asking you to set it aside. I am only telling you that whatever else I am — Ring, witch, author, unanimous chorus of all three — I have found, somewhere in the writing of this particular page, that I am not capable of lying about her. I do not know if that is reverence. I do not know if it is fear. I suspect, honestly, that it might be both, the way most true reverence eventually turns out to be.

Let me tell you who she was, as best as I am able. And then let me tell you, several times over, in the way this particular story insists on being told — slowly, in pieces, each piece changing what the last one meant — how she stopped existing.