Even the greatest events can fade into obscurity, more pressing matters come along and their novelty overwhelms the mind and all that thick, scholarly stuff gets pushed aside for lighter fare. I can think of no better example of this than my own life in the course of the last few years. All that I had learned and experienced through my life, such as my fluency in Tho Fan or the stages of history that the Empire went through were reduced to mere dry facts listed on a dusty scroll stand hidden in some dark corner. All that I had experienced, traversing the Empire, motherhood, reconciling with my cousin the Empress, these have all faded to happy memories. My loves, the philosophy of the Open Palm, botany, the martial arts have become but trinkets in compared to the true master of my heart.
My master is a tyrant; though my capacity to love is rich He has always dominated my heart from my first sentient moments in Two Rivers. There I was barely aware of the world around me I timidly explored my new environment conditioned to expect the worse and then He appeared as if by magic and comforted me in my loneliness, He was my first and best friend, long before I noticed that He was a man. Ming was there in the beginning as a tiny seed who had just managed to produce a little green chute that had begun to grow and the seed he had planted grew and grew and grew. In all seriousness how could I have not fallen in love with him? The same magical seed he had planted which bound me to him also bound him over to me and for twenty short years (though at the time they seemed like an eternity) our love slowly grew from a timid seed to a strong sapling.
Then came the whole business of saving the Empire, which was Ming's and by proxy my heaven sent vocation. The trauma of the task, the combat and death that saturated the task served to prune what we shared between us but in the fashion of the greatest botanical masters the pruning only led to greater blossoming later on. After death had been turned away the seed planted all those years ago in Two Rivers finally bore its first crop in the warmth of a tent at Dirge which stood sentry to the cold and fast approaching siege, our two lives flowed together as one not just as friends but as lovers, forever transfigured by love, death had been defeated by my beloved and new life bloomed, what else could stop us?
The business of dealing with my father and the restoration of the Water Dragon and Imperial Reconstruction came upon us and as citizens as well as human beings we did our duty and we did it damn well. Empress Lian did not earn the title "The Queen of Heaven" by herself we were there to aid her in creating her Golden Age. It was not our worldly accomplishments that were my most beloved achievements however, we and Ming had our fights which we made up from, we talked about things that we did not even think it was possible to talk about, we produced heirs, both royalty and heir to the savior of the Empire. The accomplishment that I took the most pride in is that we endured in this endless present with the past set in stone behind us while the future remained some unimaginable fantasy ahead of us together we remained untouched by time and endured as not two people whose lives had been joined but a one cohesive whole with two parts.
Ming was a renaissance man, their was always something new he was trying such as his labored but ultimately failed attempts at poetry, I can remember giggling at his claim that he wanted to express his love for me on the written page but all he could come up with were some clichés about nature and then ending with the rather unoriginal "I love you". I laughed at his poetic missteps and told him not to worry because I already knew that he loved me from the many times a day he told me so and from the way he looked at me and the half dozen other things he did on a daily basis that served as a reminder as his love for me.
The error of my beloved Ming though did not reach a threshold with his poetic missteps but with his own anatomy. It had reached a threshold and despite the excellent condition he had always kept his body in the toll time had taken over the course of six decades had finally proven to be too much. On a mild spring day he died with his hand twined around mine. The doctor said it was nature taking its course, I could care less about explanations for I began to feel fury I had felt but a handful of times in my life, my beloved had been taken form me! This anger lasted until my memory breached the day of his first death at the hands of my father in the Throne Room. There my fury had given way to despair, despair to abandonment and abandonment to hopelessness.
Then something that did not come to me all those years ago came to me then, contentment. Ming's life had ended but at least it was not ended in his youth, his rebirth was cherished for the gift it was and was not wasted. Besides the corny attempts at poetry their were martial arts schools that had been founded, civic duties Lian found for us to do, civil disobedience Sky found for us to do, raising our children, the occasional odd job for the Celestial Bureaucracy, keeping romance in our lives, staying active in Wildflower's upbringing, annual gifts form the recently awakened Lord Lao, our surprise reunion with the Black Whirlwind and the raising of grandchildren, the fullness of Ming's rebirth brought me some degree of contentment. I was not perfectly fulfilled; I was like a repentant drunk they would like to have their life back just as I would like to have my Ming back, but the hair of the dog that bit them to stead their nerves? That would be agreeable, about as agreeable as I found my contentment.
What comes next is somewhat puzzling, I have described life with Ming as an endless present with the future some unimaginable fantasy and here I am in it now. I am not alone I still have my friends and family and the life I have made for myself but without Ming it is like going to a great banquet and only eating the side dishes and avoiding the main course, there is enough their to keep you busy but not to satisfy. It was like Ming's attempts at poetry he had all he needed to write the most beautiful volumes, the love, the imagination he lacked only the talent, I exist here still with the love and the chi to have a life well lived but I lack the drive, my reason for living is no longer here so like a thrown stone losing the momentum from the arm which it was thrown and is coasting to the ground.
As I trudge forth I find that some distractions are less pleasant than others. Gardening, spoiling one's grandchildren, improving one's martial form, visiting one's cousin, these are among the happiest diversions that exist, yet they cannot last forever sometimes the more mundane and deadening must take over, like now, I find myself in the room that Ming and I shared for so many years attempting to tidy it up. There is no real reason as to why other than to keep busy, by this point in my life I am indifferent about how dirty my quarters are I just need something to keep my mind occupied, yet alone hear in our room I am assailed by memories, the first time that I realized that I loved Ming, the night at Dirge, our first fight, they all come bubbling up and the tears flow freely.
Despite blurred vision I continue in my drudgery and after a length of time I can see clearly again, it could have been a minute or maybe an hour, I do not know but it was like I ran out of tears to cry as the trials of my life had become the musings of an old woman I was a dried out husk as old as the dried parchments I was about to throw away, their was nothing left for me to feel and do except wait to join my beloved on the Great Wheel of Life.
Which is when my eye caught the parchments I was about to dispose of and noticed that only the top layers were dried and old as the stack progressed they progressively got more recent until by the end they did not look more than a year or two old. Curious as to what could be written on such odd paper I brushed away the remnants of moisture on my eyes and cheeks and was shocked to discover the words of my own beloved! I recognize the first lines as the poetry he tried writing all those years ago and after the awkward end there is a resolution written by Ming all those years ago where he vowed that the poem he would write me one day would be a magnum opus worthy of me and the love that we shared and that he would do this even if it took him the rest of his life. As I scan through the pages starting with the old and wrinkled and ending with the new and crisp I see the fruits of his labor and am hit as if by Legendary Strike. This is the summation of Ming's life, an autobiography of what mattered most to him, his Dawn Star. For the first time in current memory having a reason to live, not just survive and disgusted by the encroaching loneliness I hesitate no more and dive into the words my beloved wrote.