29. Melancholy
Melancholy
It takes me a few days to crawl out of my grave. I am not tired, I am not weak, but buried like that insulates me from the emptiness of our home, the echo of your silence.
I do not need to feed as often. I can go days, weeks, maybe even months without the need to feed. When I do hunt these days it’s a habit, the familiarity and rhythm comforting.
I tried to sleep, to let the dirt take me and time stretch around my stillness until it softened my fury.
Even without movement my mind stirs—I do not forget despite how I long to.
I want to bury this moment deeper than my grave.
If I confront it, if I examine it—you no longer care, I am no longer yours—I will crumble.
What is my life if not entangled with yours? Where do I end and you begin? I cannot face this, and I cannot marinate in my sadness anymore. Instead, I dig myself free, my anger an armor against the simmering truth.
Zora finds me quickly, jogging to keep up with my quick pace.
“Where have you been these last nights?” she asks. She looks me over quickly, assessing for injury. Why else would I disappear without telling her? She does not know the real me, the one that leaves a salon bent on worshipping her because it’s too mundane. She thinks me reliable—hah!
How can she be my only friend, yet know so little of me?
“I was struck with melancholy,” I say, not slowing my march through Palais.
“Melancholy?” She stops abruptly, laughing. “Truly? You disappeared because you were sad?”
“What do you know of sadness?” I ask, turning on her suddenly. She studies my face, her brow furrowed. For a moment I think she might run, that I might have frightened her with the intensity of my anger. It is fleeting, replaced by a stubborn downturn of her mouth.
“I have known plenty of sadness,” she says. “And not once did I hide in my home and cry about it.”
“You don’t have a home,” I shoot back before I can catch the words. Her face reddens, as if I’ve slapped her.
“It is not me you’re angry at,” she says softly.
Even with her attempts at comforting me, she displaces the conversation away from her.
I could learn something of this. I should study how she balances it, as I give too much away time and time again.
All these years with only you at my side and coerced humans left me without the skills to navigate these conversations.
It’s not as though you ever encouraged talk of my feelings.
It’s not as though you fostered a healthy way to work through my anger. Instead I push it down, let it simmer, let it fester. I become gangrenous with it, turning my organs black. When I open my mouth, it is to say things just as poisonous and cruel as I feel on the inside.
And now I’ve used it against Zora, my only friend.
“No,” I admit. “It is not.”
“Who, then?” We’re walking again, a slower pace now.
Who? Indeed. I cannot tell her of you. How do I explain centuries, millennia of devotion?
Of the bond that comes from someone giving you eternal life?
Of opulence, of famine, of war? Most of all, I cannot admit that I love you, because that is more dangerous than being an immortal creature.
This new world with a singular god at the center did not understand that I could love you so, and that you could love me back.
It was forbidden, punishable by death in some places.
It would be another several centuries before you and I could ever walk the streets together, hand in hand, or kiss in public.
But we will never know that, because what you did in Paris ruined it all.
“I cannot explain,” I say at last, because too much time has passed since Zora asked the question.
“Ah, a lover, then,” she says with a knowing nod.
I test the edges of her words, looking for what she doesn’t reveal.
There is no wistfulness, no disappointment.
I do not love Zora as I love you. You take up too much space for there to be anyone else.
I wonder about others, though. I sift through her words, her expressions, trying to understand what she sees in me.
Is it a hope for the romantic? It would seem not, and for that I am grateful.
“Yes, a lover,” I admit.
“I’m afraid I’ve nothing to say to that. I know nothing of love.”
“Yet you know of sadness?”
“They are opposing emotions,” Zora says.
“They are not. Love does not erase unpleasant emotions. Sometimes it makes those unpleasant emotions all the more visceral.”
“Perhaps it’s best I do not know love,” Zora says. “I cannot imagine my unpleasant emotions with more depth.”
“I cannot imagine you with an unpleasant emotion.”
“Trust, Melinoe, I am capable of such depth. It is not just my personality that is unpleasant. I have my own moments of…melancholy.”
We’re near the garden in the Palais. It is quiet at night, filled mostly with robbers or women of the night. I fear neither, and I sit on a bench alongside Zora.
“My family…” Zora starts, then stops. She considers her words carefully, mulling them over. When she speaks again her voice trembles, and she swallows to steady it. It does not work.
“They are complicated. My entire family for generations has all worked the same trade. It’s a dangerous one, and not a very lucrative one, at that. They have many jobs to keep up the family work. They think my thievery lazy and immoral.”
“Why must they keep up the trade if it taxes them so?” I ask.
“It is in our blood. For as long as anyone can remember, it is what we did. Even if we do not seek out the work, the work will find us.”
“Do you not like this work?”
“It is…” She trails off, chewing her bottom lip. I do not know this side of Zora, and I long to understand it. “It is all I know, it is how I was raised. If I reject it, who will I be? Not just an outcast to my family, but a part of me will cease to exist.”
“You do not understand where you begin and end, because you are so entangled with it?”
“Yes!” she exclaims, her light returned.
“That is exactly how it feels. There is this…inevitability. This internal drive, here.” She presses against her chest, to her heart that races as she speaks.
“It is my guiding force. It’s kept me and my family alive—well, mostly alive.
If I ignore it, I fear there will be nothing of Zora without…
” She trails off, unwilling to say the word.
“My line is dying. The work is too dangerous, and I am beginning to think that…perhaps it is wrong? No, misled? Yes, like there are pieces of knowledge my ancestors did not have, so they invented something awful to justify their positions. It makes me question everything. Who am I? Was my entire childhood, what I was raised and taught to do, built on a lie?” She sinks to the bench, her fingers toying with the cuff of her sleeve.
“Is that why you left home for Paris?”
“No—Paris taught me these truths. Before Paris, I did not believe. I had to see it with my own eyes, I think. But even as I know my parents spoke the truth, it feels like it is a half-truth. That they were not entirely truthful. Now…” She trails off, sighing.
“Have you spoken to your family about these lies?” I ask.
“Have you spoken to your lover about your anger?” she parries.
“That is different,” I protest.
“It is not. My truths mean consequences. I do not think my family will so readily accept what I’ve to say.
I’m already an outcast. I was sent here so I no longer sullied the family name.
If I were to return and tell them they were wrong, that centuries of knowledge is inaccurate…
They would not accept this. I would go from outcast to pariah. Or they’d execute me.”
“Execute you? That is dramatic.”
“It is the truth,” she says quickly. “You don’t understand, just as I don’t understand your feud with your lover.
Accept that whatever keeps you from making peace with them is exactly what keeps me from making peace with my family.
Accept that we walk two separate paths that the other will never understand. ”
There was only one way to make Zora understand my path, and that was to live it. I wish time hadn’t erased my first memories of meeting you. How did you tell me what you were? What did you say of this life? How does one never reveal their nature to humans, yet create life?
“This upsets you,” Zora says, misunderstanding my silence.
“No—I am simply thinking. You are right, I do not understand your worries, just as you do not understand mine. Perhaps we can grieve together in that knowledge, that we are both influenced by circumstances we cannot control.”
“I wish I could elaborate. Do not think that I am withholding because of anything within my control. There are…rules. Even speaking like this is dangerous for me.”
“Speaking in abstracts? For a family that is countries away and too poor to live off their vocation, they have much power.”
Zora’s smile is fleeting and sad. “It is not their power. It is a price, a curse, one that they didn’t understand. But enough of this melancholy. I think the remedy for us is a bit of fun. I want to test your sleight of hand this evening. Have you played cards before?”
Zora knew of a gambling hall that allowed women to play, where she slipped cards in and out of her sleeve to win more and more money.
I sat opposite her, telling her of my cards with subtle taps on the table.
By the time the moon began her descent, the other patrons were on to us, cursing and kicking us out the door.
Zora stuffed her pocket and her satchel with her money and ran through the street, too fast for the lumbering drunks to catch her.
I caught one and drank him dry, leaving his body discarded in the shadows of the alley behind the gambling hall.
Zora waited for me at our meeting place, her gaze far away as she stared into the thinning crowd of the night. Soon the day workers would stir, and the streets would fill with the steady thrum of the city.
“Bonsoir,” I say, then hesitate. Her expression is no longer the feckless thief, it is the introspective woman lamenting her past. “What is it?”
“I am at a crossroads,” she says. “I do not know which way to go.”
“I am sure you’ve assessed the risks of both roads,” I remark. Her eyes track my movements, her muscles tense. Then she sighs and shakes her head.
“Bonsoir,” she says. “I hope things with your lover settle after a night away.”
I give a small smile and shake my head. “I fear it will take more than a night away to restore peace.” Do I want to restore peace?
My anger returns, hot and acrid. Why must the thought of you destroy everything?
This evening was ripe for the taking, and I spent the first bit of it lamenting on a bench in the garden.
Now you take the shine out of the night, dulling what should have been a wonderful evening.
“There’s still time,” Zora says.
“Yes. Much time,” I agree.
“Yes,” Zora agrees, her gaze far away again. I want to stay, to ask her what troubles her, to question her crossroads. If I linger, I will be caught outside in the sun, and that is not something I can escape.
So I return home and slip into my grave alone, my arms wrapped tight around my body, as if it will hold my aching heart in place.