When I finally saw him, something in me unfastened. Here was someone who would have given me a kingdom and a throne without the expectation of my heart or my bed in return. Here was someone who saw me as no one ever had. When he looked at me, he didn’t see night but the potential it brought: dreams and songs not yet sung, potential and creation.
Uloopi’s and Nritti’s words surrounded my heart and I spoke nothing but truths. I wasn’t afraid of being scared. Life was too long for that. But the more I spoke, the more he curled in on himself. Over and over, I laid my heart bare.
Over and over, it crumpled.
***
A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk.
I was losing track of it all. I was sitting in the middle of my garden of glass when the trees rustled. Hope plucked at my bones, playing me like an instrument until I thought my whole body was singing. But when I looked up, it was not the Dharma Raja standing at the edge of the horizon, but Nritti.
“Have you no smile for me, sister?” she asked, beaming.
But one look at my face told her everything. She ran to me then, her arms soft around my shaking shoulders.
“What do I do?”
At this, she lifted my chin. “Go toTeej.If he doesn’t come, then you know that you have lost nothing but time. And we have plenty of that to spend without consequence.”
I nodded, but the truth was that I did not want to spend time without consequence. I had glimpsed something more, a purpose that I was beginning to unlock day by day. The visitors to my dream wells had doubled and tripled in the past couple of days. Little by little, they were remembering the images I had spun. Little by little, my voice was being carried out into the world. The Dharma Raja’s words floated back to me:We could rewrite the world, you and I.
I didn’t need him, or anyone, to rewrite the world. But beside him, I had felt as if there was a world for me alone. A place that lived at the seams of my heart and grew there, wrapping glass vines around my bones and burying stars in my heart. It was a place of quiet and creativity. And if I had the choice, I never wanted to be without it.
But it seemed that wasn’t my choice to make.
“I’ll go toTeej.”
10
DEATH
The days blurred. I walked the halls, fed the hounds, stood before the Tapestry. Everywhere I moved, thoughts of her robbed me to the point where I sometimes didn’t recognize where I stood or where I was going.Fear is like a curse. But I choose differently. I wish I could say the same for you.I couldn’t shake those devious thoughts out of my head. She bent the way I saw the world. But she couldn’t bend it to the point that it broke a curse.
Today wasTeej.I tried to forget it, to lose myself in some other thought. But I couldn’t.
The sky tilted to dusk. I fled to a part of the kingdom where souls waited to be categorized and organized, remade and reshaped. There, a familiar soul caught the light. And I remembered the request of the wife from so long ago, the woman whose words had spurred the listless existence that would very well be my future.
“Do you wish to wait for your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I love her.”
“Why?”
“Because life does not look how it should without her. It is a piece gone missing, a perspective that reminds me what it means to live. Without her, my life would be colorless. Life does not owe me fairness. But I will see beauty, even if I must fight for it. So will you let me stay beside her? And wait until she comes?”
Maybe the words hadn’t truly come to me until now. But finally, finally, I saw it. And the truth was a latch in my heart. The soul reached out and touched me, and in it, I saw the barren wasteland of my thoughts. How the world had lost shape and color and texture since I had not seen her. What she coaxed out of me was a visceral need to live, and wasn’t that what fueled immortality and made it worthwhile anyway? That there were wonders still left to be uncovered? Perhaps she could not bend the world such that it would break a curse. But she had bent my thoughts until I saw hope around its meaning, silver in its bleakness. I wanted to believe the curse had broken. Because I did love her. I couldn’t remember where it started and I couldn’t fathom it stopping. And she had left. And the pain of it had sucked the color from my world.
“I grant you this request,” I said.
And then, I ran.
Gupta was waiting for me, a dark greensherwanijacket in his hands.
“I have been waiting out here for so long, I thought I had started aging.”
