Chapter 21 #2
You would go back to the cold, the green says, and there’s such grief in it, such old bewildered grief, because it truly does not understand, it has been alone so long it’s forgotten there was ever a difference.
You would leave this, to be hurt again, to lose again, to die a mortal death in a mortal span while I would keep you past the stars?
Why. Why would anything choose the losing over the keeping.
I do not understand. I have never understood. It is why I am so alone.
And there it is. That’s the wound at the bottom of a hundred years of fury, laid bare in the warm green dark.
It doesn’t understand why anyone would choose the breakable thing over the kept thing.
It never has. And I feel, in the grief of it asking, just how deep the not-understanding goes, how old, how total.
This is a thing that has held the whole living world alive for an age, that has kept the bloom and the seed and the deep root through every killing winter, that has given and given, and it has never once in all that time been chosen.
Owed, yes. Feared, yes. Paid, and then forgotten, and then paid again in fear.
But never picked. Never wanted for its own sake by a thing that could have walked away and stayed instead.
It has kept everything and been chosen by nothing, and it genuinely cannot conceive that the second thing even exists, that there is a kind of being-wanted that keeping actively murders, because to a thing that only knows how to hold, opening its hand looks like nothing in the world but loss.
That not-understanding is exactly the loneliness that’s been souring honey out of shut jars all month, because a thing that can only keep, that has never once been chosen, that cannot tell the difference between being wanted and being had, is the loneliest thing in all creation, and it has been alone with that not-understanding since before the war, since before the first bargain, since before there were mortals to forget it.
A hundred years isn’t even the half of it.
It has been alone since the world was young, and it never knew there was any other way to be.
So I do the only thing I’ve ever been any good at. I don’t fight it. I teach it.
“Because the losing is what makes it real,” I tell the green, gentle, the same gentle I give a frightened swarm, the same gentle I’d give any hurting thing.
“That’s the secret nobody ever told you.
A thing you can’t lose isn’t precious, it’s just permanent, and permanent isn’t the same as loved, it’s the opposite, it’s the thing love happens instead of.
I’m precious to Madoc because he could lose me.
Every morning he chooses me knowing I could be gone by noon, and that choosing is worth more than a thousand years of keeping, because it’s given, free, at risk, when it didn’t have to be.
You’ve been trying to end your loneliness by keeping things.
But keeping is what makes the loneliness.
You end it by being chosen. And you can’t be chosen while you’re holding somebody against a door they can’t open.
So open the door. Let me go. Let me choose whether to help you.
And find out, maybe for the first time in your whole long life, what it feels like to be picked instead of kept. ”
The green is quiet a long, long time.
All around me the warmth holds, and trembles, and I feel it doing the hardest thing a thing that old can do, which is consider that it might have been wrong.
A hundred years of fury built on one certainty, that it was owed and cheated and that the answer to being alone was to hold tighter, to keep harder, to take what wouldn’t stay, and here’s a small mortal woman in the middle of its keeping telling it that the certainty itself was the wound.
I feel it resist. I feel the century of grief rear up against the idea, because if I’m right then all the fury was for nothing, all the souring and the frightening and the reaching for children, all of it, a hundred years of a lonely god making itself lonelier by the only means it knew.
That’s a terrible thing to be shown about yourself.
I know. I spent thirty years running from a place I wanted because I was so sure wanting it would cost me, and finding out I was wrong, finding out I could have stopped running years ago, that hurt worse than any leaving ever did.
So I hold still in the warmth and I let it hurt, the same as I let my own hurt land in a woodwright’s yard, and I don’t rush it, because a thing this old doesn’t turn in a moment, and something ancient and lonely and vast turns over a thought it has never once let itself think.
If I open the door, it says at last, very small for a thing so large, you will leave. They always leave. That is what the mortal ones do. They forget, and they leave, and I am alone again.
“Some of us leave,” I agree. “I’m not going to lie to you, you’d know it.
Some of us forget and leave. But I’m the one who came back, remember?
I’m the one who heard you. I got taken into the most beautiful keeping in the world, everything I ever wanted, and I’m asking you to open the door, and here’s the thing, here’s the whole miracle of it.
” I gather the last of myself, the choosing part, the part the green couldn’t take because I never had it to lose until three weeks ago in a broken wagon.
“I’m not asking you to open the door so I can leave.
I’m asking you to open it so I can choose to stay in the world and help you anyway.
Freely. Not kept. Chosen. There’s a thing I never got to say, out there, a promise I never finished, and I want to go finish it, out loud, where you can hear, and then I want to help you learn the difference between kept and chosen for the rest of my mortal life, one bloom at a time, because you deserve to learn it, you’ve been owed it longer than the tithe.
Open the door, and I swear on the bees I’ll spend my whole life teaching a lonely god how to be picked.
That’s a better forever than keeping me.
Trust me. I’m the bee-girl. I know sweet from permanent. Open the door.”
You would come back, the green says, and its dry vast grieving voice does a thing I’ve never heard it do, it wavers, it hopes, an enormous ancient thing hoping like a child afraid to.
Not kept. Not owed. You would go back into the cold and the losing and the mortal dying, and you would still come back to me, of your own choosing, and teach me.
Why. I took you. I frightened your town and soured your sweetness and reached for your children and stole you out of your own life.
Why would you come back to a thing that did all that.
“Because you did all that out of the same hurt I’ve been running from my whole life,” I tell it, and I mean it down to the floor of me.
“You’re not a monster. You’re the loneliest thing in the world and nobody ever once showed you the way out of it.
Everybody just paid you or feared you or forgot you.
Nobody stayed to teach you. Well. I’m the bee-girl who came back.
I stay for the hard hurting things now, that’s what I learned this month, I put my hand on the hurting thing and I don’t leave.
So yes. I’d come back. Not because you deserve keeping, but because you deserve teaching, and I’m the one who can.
Open the door, and find out what it’s like to have somebody choose to come back to you.
It’s better than anything you can hold. I promise you on the bees.
It’s what everything alive is really reaching for, and you can have it, but only, only, if you open your hand. ”
And in the warm green heart of the thing that keeps, something that has been shut for a hundred years, something older than the war, older than the grief, wavers, and aches, and wants, and, terrified, at the exact cost of everything it has ever believed kept it safe, begins, very slowly, to open.
I feel it. The warmth around me loosens by the smallest degree, the arms of the keeping unclenching a fraction, a thing a hundred years locked learning, one trembling inch at a time, how to hold a thing without gripping it, how to want a thing without caging it, how to open a door not knowing if what you love will walk back through it.
It’s the bravest thing I have ever felt anything do.
And it’s only just begun, and it’s already the beginning of the end of a hundred years of grief, and I hold still in the loosening warmth and I let a lonely god learn, by slow inches, in the dark, the first lesson of being chosen, which is that you have to risk the leaving to ever be worth the staying.