Yesterday was Wednesday. The sky was blue, the kind that goes on and on and makes you think about eternity. It was two in the afternoon, and I could hear the mourning doves at the window as I had my breakfast earlier, but at that point in the day they had gone quiet again, the way they always do in the heat.
I had been at the desk since that morning with Eîra. She is eleven hundred and seventy-five years old, which is what she is when I am with her and what she is when I am not. She lives in a ruined library at the end of the world, alone, and she has been alone for so long that the silence in the library has become her companion. Her Papa made her, but now he is gone. Yet still, she was made to remember.
I had been working on editing a passage where she tries to remember his face.
But Papa was gone and had been gone for so long that sometimes she had trouble remembering what his face even looked like. His voice was perfectly preserved in her memory, every word he had ever said, exact and unchanging, but his face was like writing left out in the rain.
She could recall the shape of it, the colour of his eyes, brown like earth, and kind. The grey streaks in his hair and the lines around his mouth when he smiled. But when she tried to picture it all together, it was like a blur. All she had was a collection of details, a catalogue rather than a memory.
I wrote that this week, and my own father has been dead almost four years.
I am not sure when I noticed. There is a kind of writing where the page knows something before you do, and the body catches up later, sometimes much later, sometimes in a chair on a Wednesday afternoon with the doves gone quiet outside. I do not know when I gave Eîra the rain on the writing. I do not know when I gave her the catalogue. I do know that I gave it to her and that she has been holding it for me, in a library two thousand years from now, while I sit in the Everglades and do not.
The doves came back in the evening. They have a coo that I have known probably since before I even have a memory to place it. My great-grandmother helped raise me, and the room I slept in at her house had a window that looked out onto the gardenia trees, and in the evenings the train would come through, and the doves would sing. The room was mine as much as any room has been mine. She is gone too, so are the gardenias.
So, there are three rooms. The library where Eîra is, and the room with the gardenias, and the one I am in now, which is the one that has the actual light in it, the actual two o'clock, the actual blue. They are all present. None of them resolves into the most real. I write inside that arrangement most days now, though I do not always notice the arrangement itself.
Today I write this, and the light has moved. It is on the far wall now, the one with nothing on it. The doves will coo again this evening.
Eîra is still in the library. She will be there tomorrow, and I will go back, and she will not be alone.
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