Dwelling in Emptiness

'Hey, are you awake?'

She held the weight of the RotomPhone in her hands, staring at the screen before her, the words she had typed, watching as three dots formed below, the suggestion of a reply.

They hung there for a moment, disappeared, and then reappeared, a loss of reception perhaps, a rephrasing of words, and then suddenly:

'Of course I'm awake, you daft apeth, it's like 2pm.'

She smiled quietly, a sense of relief at the reassurance of such a casual reply—something normal, something stripped of pretension, something free of the endless anxiety she had felt on this long trip, this most awful of family vacations.

Beneath her, she felt the gentle movement of the ship as it continued to navigate the channel between the broken ice, and, lying on her belly amidst the dishevelled sheets of her bunk, Snowy asleep on her back, the phone before her, she began to type once more.

'So, we found my father.'

Almost immediately, the girl on the other side of the world was typing a reply.

'That's great news! Did you give him a slap for being gone so long?'

She laughed, and surprisingly felt tears in her eyes as she typed her reply. In truth, that had been the one thing she had wanted to do, the sight of him standing there on the threshold of his cabin, his expression blank as he looked at her, the sound of the utsuroid that had taken her place playing the piano from the back room.

It was wrong to feel that way, she knew that, after all, it wasn't her father's fault that he had missed most of her childhood, it wasn't the utsuroid's fault that whatever dim memories had remained within him had led to the creature taking on the role of a daughter in her absence—and yet still she couldn't make the feelings go away. Despite the belief that she shouldn't feel that way, she did.

She didn't want to blame her father, she didn't want to blame the utsuroid that had stayed by his side, after all, they were all together now, everything was going to be fine… yet also, all those years that lay between them could never be reclaimed.

Had he never wondered who he was, had he never asked where he came from? Had he never sought out others, never wondered why all the mirrors in the house where blackened and broken?

She felt it in her body, the tension of her anger, the tremble of her misery.

On the screen, three dots appeared.

She heard the words in the other girl's voice, and at once she felt both lonely and assured, desperate to be back on Melemele Island, desperate to be by the other girl's side, to feel the warmth of her closeness, the trust between them, the bond that could never be broken.

'Lillie, it's okay to be angry.'

Tears ran down her face, warm and bitter, and for a moment, like the utsuroid must have felt, she was glad for the absence of mirrors.