“Another one of these collections,” I say. “Why now? When I haven’t written another book in the canon yet?”
I’m not sure who’s going to show up to answer this question; I feel like any one of the Ai-Naidar could. But the hiss of fabric precedes a completely unexpected woman who lights on the sofa alongside me and takes my cup of tea out of my hands to sample the steam. I stare at her, astonished… at the retrousse nose, the heavily lashed eyes, the uncompromising curves and lines of the face of a woman who changed an empire.
“Because,” Ereseya says, “you cannot write another book until you find your way home. Of course. We are so far from you, aunerai. Through a veil of time and distance in your heart, over a bridge of fever dreams. You must talk yourself into our arms.”
Oh—she talks like she wrote poetry. How beautiful she is. I think. I think she’s beautiful. She’s one of those people it’s impossible to see because who she is animates her features, her movements. The apprehension of her mere physicality is an afterthought, like noticing a painting’s canvas. But I love her, immediately, while cognizant of how dangerous it is to love her, and not at all caring. She is singular and perfect.
“I… I suppose I must,” I say. “And Kherishdar seems very far away from me right now.”
“And so you yearn for it.” She states it as if it is fact, incontrovertible. Like she has mapped the nature of desire so completely that it is no longer mysterious to her. She hands me back my cup, because I had my hands open in tacit request.
“Forgive me,” I say. “It is green tea, and you should not have the chemicals in it.”
“It has a bracing smell.” She studies me, interested. “I see my immortality in your gaze, aunerai. And I taste words in your mouth. You are a poet and deny it to yourself. Just as you deny yourself a home… but that’s as it should be. An artist can never be home, or they lose the memory of their wounds. And then they can neither heal nor harm. One must be exquisitely alive, to be what you are. Are you? Ah, you doubt. Doubt is good.”
“Doubt quells, sometimes,” I murmur.
Her smile is quixotic, as enticing as a hint of perfume in an empty room. “Doubt about life? Never. Doubt about the art, maybe. But doubt in life begs questions. Questions are at the heart of poetry.”
“And answers?”
“No one wants answers,” Ereseya says dismissively. “Answers intoned by others are advice, and instruction, and judgment. They are cages, and we resent them. The only answers we accept are the ones we wrest, bloody and fresh, from our striving hearts. Then they are real, they are personal, they are true. Art can suggest answers but never give them. We exist, like desire, in the gap between imagination and consummation. The fulfillment of the goal, aunerai, is never as sweet as the pursuit of it.”
“The journey is the destination,” I murmur.
“And we are never done until we are gone,” she agrees. “So, ashaeli… chase us until you catch us. Until we are ready to be caught and you are ready to be done desiring us, and need the consummation more than you fear the regret of an ending.”
“And then,” I say, “I chase you again, because you are never ended, and never done receding into the distance.”
“Like laughter,” she says. “And memory. And the taste of wine, when you wake after celebration.” She leans toward me and I think she’s about to kiss me, but at the moment where she might, her lips brush, brief as a breath, against the corner of mine. “Come be our immortality. Come become your own.”
And then she’s gone, and I have a cup of tea and an aching, hollow space on the inside of me, shaped the way a bell’s is, and for the same reason: so that it can shiver, and shivering, sing.
“So,” I say to the air, and the Ai-Naidar waiting there, “Another book… eventually. And in the meantime… we talk. So. Let’s talk.”
ashael [ ah SHAYL ] (n) - poets
rujzal [ roo JZAHL ] (v) – to seduce
