you in his spotted garments / shall yourself lie wrapped

[valmont-vicomte.livejournal.com]

Friday morning, walking outside town

I awoke in bed with Hermia, and that was as it should be - and then it felt like it wasn't, and was. I climbed out of bed in the pre-dawn dark and stumbled to the bathroom, feeling sick with a strange and terrible rush of memories, and as I crouched panting over the toilet bowl waiting for vomiting that never came I thought perhaps I had been wakened from a long and very vivid dream.

But it wasn't. It wasn't.

I talked to Hermia a little, both of us confused, and then I went out into town and talked to people, and began to put things together.

I wish -

Oh, I did. I did.

I don't understand the rest of it, what happened to us, though I can guess at who might have wished for some of it at least (and thinking of Micah makes me cringe a little, embarrassment and guilt together), but I can't really think of any of that now.

I follow the river for a little way, and I think of a poem I learned long ago.

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

It's almost worse, I think, than when she died. Because after that I could only imagine what it could have been like if she'd lived. And now -

Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.

She was a child when she died, barely more than a child, and though I thought I was a man then looking back I know I was still a boy, and the grief was terrible. But I've learned to deal with it since then, to bear it. To be able to love her but move past what might have been.

I always knew she would be a lovely woman.

I don't know how to get through this again. I think of that moment on the field not far from here where Lysander stabbed me and I thought I was going to die, and I think: I would live through that a hundred times, if I had to. If I could make this different.

So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.

Oh, Marie.

[closed]