“It’s an interesting sort of a thing to have to describe, Sorrower.”
The sun in the garden dazzled upon her golden hair; her bare feet trailed in the shimmering dew as they walked.
“To not have feelings and yet to feel both at the same time is a tricky thing,” she went on to say. “For one to be true the other must be false, yet both are truths.”
“Tell me of one part,” The Sorrower said, “then of the other.” He walked beside her, standing to the west so his large shadow wouldn’t fall upon her.
“We’ll start, then, with the part that doesn’t feel. Not properly, not really. It all feels an act, and I the actress. I read from the script so well that sometimes, I can almost convince myself it’s genuine. But there’s always this part, this detached part separate from the world, always on the outside looking in. That part knows none of it is genuine. I am both puppetmaster and puppet.”
“This part that exists outside,” The Sorrower said, “it is the part that also feels?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it only feels one thing.”
“What is that?”
“Oh, Sorrower, I don’t know how to put it in words. It is a sting. It is an emptiness. It is a longing, but for what, I don’t know. Longing for something that likely doesn’t exist, somewhere that isn’t real. It is a hollow, dull ache. It is a yearning for a place I cannot go, that I can only glimpse.”
“Glimpse?”
“I see it in the dewdrops,” she said, drawing to a stop, looking around at the shimmering of the garden’s grass. “I see it in songs I can only half remember, as though I heard them in a dream. I see it in places where the walls between the worlds seem thin, in cosmic meetings of times and places where it seems as though another story may be about to begin.”
“The space between lightning and thunder,” the Sorrower said.
She beamed at him. She almost meant it.
“These places, these times, these arranging of circumstances: I feel like if I was light enough, if I was unburdened, the next breeze would carry me away. Carry me through, to someplace else. Someplace better. I don’t belong here, Sorrower. Whatever soul I have was crafted somewhere else, somewhere it longs to go back to. A misplaced jigsaw piece feels inadequate without the jigsaw, you see. It is an individual piece, but it belongs to a bigger picture; they are ontologically connected.”
The Sorrower led her silently into the clearing at the center of the garden. There was a gate there, a wooden thing. It led to nowhere. The gate was closed. Nearby stood The Sorrower’s table, with The Sorrower’s bag waiting upon.
“Can you help me, Sorrower?”
“Perhaps,” he said. He took his seat and from his bag removed several vials of oddly colored liquids, jars of smoke, tubs of creams. She sat across from him as he removed a bowl for mixing. “An intrusive thought,” he said, naming the ingredients aloud as he added them. “A half-forgotten song. A threshold. The silence after a bell’s chime. A secret taken to the grave.” And the last ingredient was seemingly nothing at all, which he added to the mixture with great success regardless: “A man’s last breath.”
The Sorrower stood, and she stood with him, walking over to the gate, their feet leaving trails in the dewed grass. The Sorrower reached into his bowl, grabbed a fistful of the powder therein, and threw it upon the gate.
“There,” he said.
“Where does it go?” She asked.
“Someplace better.”
As he opened the gate, she beamed at him. She meant it.
“Are you coming with me, Sorrower?”
“Why would I?”
“Because you’re like me. You are a man between, between what is real and what is abstract. Between us and the metaphysical reality we occupy. Belonging to neither, yet called upon to balance both. Why would you not want to go someplace better?”
The Sorrower sighed, his massive shoulders heaving with the motion. “I am The Sorrower,” he said. “There is no better place than the one in which I am needed.”
She nodded her understanding.
“Goodbye, Sorrower. And thank you. Perhaps I will send you a message on the next breeze that blows from my world to yours.”
She stepped through the gate. The breeze disturbed the dew on the leaves of grass as she stepped through on the wind of someone else’s dying breath.
The Sorrower closed the gate behind her.
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