Being in her presence feels like basking in sunshine. Like she brings a lightness into the room with her, like everything is more possible, and the thoughts weighing on me don’t feel so heavy.
The last thing I want is to bring her bright energy down.
If my learning how to bake bread will ease her spirit—and the strain my presence will bring—then I will, of all the things I can’t imagine for myself, bake bread.
For someone who can’t do it herself, the depth and breadth of Tasa’s knowledge is remarkable, but she resists any attempt to acknowledge that.
As though curiosity about the world is not remarkable on its own, and it is only through practical results that she can have value.
And I understand that way of thinking too well. My failure—unwillingness or inability, either way the result is the same—to work magic on the scale of the Sage of Wrath’s tremendous dampening field has made me feel useless.
But in Tasa, who clearly has so muchmoreto offer the world, this bothers me.
So I’m thinking about it.
I don’t have any answers yet, but I am thinking.
For all the good it has done me so far. What I need is to act, but Idon’t know how.
The only inkling my own brain has offered up since meeting Tasa is a yearning for more than basking in her joy: participating in it,touchingit; touchingher. I banish the thought, stilling with an act of will the unexpected urge to reach for her as it continues cropping up like a twitch, because this is not one it is in any way appropriate to pursue even if I knew how.
I am a guest in Tasa’s house, but not a welcome one, and I don’t dare make this situation more awkward.
My own thoughts are too mixed in any case, so I will do what Tasa wants.
Bake bread.
And no more.
Bake bread, and not touch her any more than necessary, or stare at her like her face contains the answers to any question I might ask, or ask her everything I want to know about her.
Listen to her words, and what she does not say so that I may fill in the gaps. Focus on how she moves, that I might move with her and not against her.
That is what is available to me.
But after I have mixed the bread dough, waited the precise recommended time, and added more starter, Tasa leaves to hike back down the mountain, and my abrupt tension when she announces this takes us both by surprise.
Apparently she hikes up and down this mountain twice each day in order to not be in the way of the villagers.
This bothers me too. A great deal.
But I recognize that people do what they must to make money, and if she believes this is the best way to do it, who am I to gainsay her?
So while she is gone, I wait.
I’ve committed all her instructions to memory, so first I write them all down in the book she provided.
It’s a gorgeous tome. It feels wrong to use it for something so mundane.
Then again: how to live may be mundane, but it is also, in a way, the most important question a person faces.
I fold the bread.
Tasa told me to explore the cottage while she was out, so that’s next. She seems to be both proud and embarrassed by it and was too nervous to show me herself. I can’t deny that I’m curious why.
The main room contains both the kitchen, the cozier section where we talked which is for, I assume, relaxing, and a small dining table in between to break up each space. She has laid out the room with an economical efficiency I admire.
There are wings on each side with more rooms. On one side there is a workshop with a slab of wood repurposed as a table and a sturdy chair, while the rest is full of tools, slabs, and trinkets and all kinds of things I can’t even identify.
