TLV - Notes For People Left Behind

[howtheyshine]

What it says on the tin. There are two headings, one for notes he wrote before his disappearance and one for notes he wrote to send with Jedao back to the barge. I'll be adding more over the next week as I finish them!

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for John

[howtheyshine]

Dear brother,

Jedao probably told you about it before you even had a chance to read this, but I forgot everything for a little while. I didn't remember who I was or where, or why the man I was with had his eyes pulled out of his head, the tissue where they rested cut by glass and burned by frost. The world was huge and strange all over again. I was terrified. When Jedao came I'd only been awake for a few minutes, and Larson, groaning, mutilated, was my only company. He flinched whenever I tried to speak to him.

There was a time when I would have assumed I'd done the damage, and I would have tried to use his fear. If I'd remembered more, if I'd remembered anything, maybe I would have tried to hurt him right then. Maybe I would have killed him immediately. In the end I didn't kill him, I did worse, and I feel strange about it, but not bad. Not ashamed.

And that isn't the point, anyway. The point is that I woke with no memory in a strange place with a blind man and the first thing I did was show concern. There are a lot of people who helped me become someone who will care first, before anything else occurs to them. Hunter, my parents, Zerxus, Trevor, Arthur. Even Charlie. But the one who made it possible at all was you.

The first day we met, I let you down. You were kind to me, gentle with me, you showed me something beautiful, let me explore your home, and I tried to break things I had no right to touch. You didn't want me to hurt Arthur, and I did it anyway. I killed him. I let you down, and you gave me something to make my life on board easier. Something that made me think of you every time I piled books in it to take back to my cabin, or pulled a load of crab apples out of the greenhouse, or took art supplies from the gazebo. I thought of you, but I didn't say thank you. Yet you still followed me into the woods that night. That's the night I remember feeling like something was changing. It was all overwhelming, too much, I didn't have room in my own head to think, but you...

Every time I got angry, you told me it was okay. That it made sense. That I could feel that way if I wanted to. I didn't realize it until later, much later, but that was the very first time I wondered if I could feel ways that people didn't like. If I was allowed to feel things that put me at odds with others and not have pain as the only result.

That was the night you told me that Arthur hurt me because he was in pain. I didn't care at the time. I thought it was good. I was glad he'd been in pain, because I didn't see the spiral that it made. I was still in the middle of it, spinning. But the words were there. I'd heard them. They slipped in like smoke through a cracked window.

He was hurting, and he lashes out when he's hurting. And somewhere along the way I realized I was more like Arthur than I ever wanted to be. I'm not writing that to say I'm better than him, that I made myself better by being unlike him, that isn't at all what I mean. I mean that we both hurt so much and were so afraid of hurting more that we would strike first, if it looked as though we might need to. I'm thinking of us now and my heart hurts for us both. And it hurts even more for you, because somehow you cradled all those broken edges and bled without complaint.

I saw the things you sent with Jedao. I saw how worried you must have been about him and about me. He told me you'd wanted to come but you were afraid of what attention it might draw, and...

Sometimes it strikes me how strange the universe is, that so much of love is felt through pain. We see love most clearly when we lose it, when we miss it, when we hurt it by biting without reason.

But it's also part of how I know, without a doubt, that I miss you with everything I am. Because so much of what I am is what you helped me become. I miss you so much, every day, and it's how I understand for the very, very first time, what you mean when you say no one can be replaced. The shape of what's missing in me can't be filled by anyone. Not even the John I have the chance to know here. Not at all.

I think in a way our spirits are built from the people that surround us. We see the things we admire in the people we love and we try to embody those things. We see the things that hurt us, the ways we hurt others, and we try to distance ourselves from causing that kind of damage. The ways we fit together are infinite, like a puzzle made of mirror pieces, reflecting itself until all the lines cross. No one will ever fill the spaces made in us by others. But some piece of some new friend can wriggle into a corner of the gap. It can still make enough of the picture for us to be whole, if hole-y.

There are so many people here who remind me of you. The cats, of course, though you're more beautiful than any of them. If you tell them I said as much I'll deny it. There's a baker here who cooks the most practical, hearty things, all of them delicious, none of them fancy. But every so often she'll create a cake so big and so elaborate that it takes half the village to eat the thing, and no one wants to cut the first piece because the cake looks like a sculpture. There's a man I sing with in a nearby inn, sometimes, and his voice reminds me of you. Your voice, but also the way you play the violin. His voice makes me ache with hope when he carries a note. There's a mummer here that I'm teaching the story of Hogfather.

I'm starting to wonder-- No, I think I'm starting to understand that I've been a little too sparse with the idea of home. I've been a too limited in giving pieces of myself to others. Giving pieces away is how a person makes room for the parts that others fill in. We're strange, beautiful, changing puzzles that never fit quite like they did before someone passed into and out of a life. I know you haven't passed out of mine. The hole is still there. Nothing will fill it, but I have friends who pad the edges for me until we can see each other again. We might not fit the way we did before, and it might take some figuring out, but I'm not afraid of it. (I'm not afraid of it today, but I might be tomorrow, but I won't be again. I understand that too these days.)

I love you, brother, and I look forward to finding the new ways we fit together when I see you again.

With love,

Cho Edwin Buck