7: Dilemma
After all the long years of it, silence is no longer the comfort that it should be. Shadows dance across the walls of her old sanctuary as they loom higher and press in, crushing her. With even that turned upon her, she isn't sure where else she can go.
Her mother died last summer, but that day and the days that followed it are little more than sandy memories, really. She barely shed a tear. It had been a good life. Even good lives must end, however, and she knew. She knows.
Still, she wonders, distantly and with a faint pang of guilt, whether it is a disservice to her mother's memory that she has not grieved as much as others tell her she should. She wonders whether it is a disservice to herself that she does not feel things as others tell her she should.
Oh well.
"Mother, I'm sorry I did not weep at your funeral," she says to the cool, clean earth of the grave as she sweeps the fallen leaves from it one afternoon. Her voice grazes her throat, gently, like an old tool rusty from disuse. "I couldn't. The healer-woman rebuked me for that, but I couldn't. I don't know why. You understand, don't you?"
The earth and the stone, of course, say nothing. But she can imagine they do. Perhaps that is enough.
"She asked me why I wasn't weeping, and I told her that you lived a good life, and it ended. That's just the way things are." The crackling sweep of broom and leaves soothes her. "And she said something odd then. It went something like, 'Don't presume to know of life. You haven't loved. You haven't hated. You haven't wanted. You've made no choices that you can be proud of, and none you can regret. You haven't changed if you could stop it, child, and that will be your doom and early death. When you're an old woman just like me, you'll look back on every single year and you'll see a complete waste. Just you wait.'"
She pauses for breath, as if saying so many words at once is an effort she's experienced only few times before. "Have I wasted my years, mother? It's becoming difficult to tell, now. I look at the empty hallways and the closed doors and I think that maybe it is time for something different."
A sigh.
"But where… where would I go? What would I do? At least, here…"
Another sigh.
"I am alone now. Completely, utterly alone."
What monotony.
"Would you be disappointed in me? Would Father?" Her eyes catch sight of an object leaning against the wall of her house, and she leaves her broom to examine it. For the first time in forever, she feels her heart twist a little.
The shaft is smooth with age, the bronze head tarnished and dull. It's an old spear, the last reminder of an old friend that brings a tear unbidden to her eye. It rolls, warm and sweet and unfamiliar, down her cheek. Her hand moves of its own accord to wipe it away. It's only one tear, yes, but one is enough.
"Would you…?"
Perhaps he has returned to the earth as well, and he would not answer her. Perhaps not. Either way, she will not see him again.
"I miss you, you know. I wish you wouldn't trouble me like that."