It is harder for me to leave, now, with father watching so closely. I think it is because he cares more that he is watching me. Dog is gone, and now he must care for me.

Dog is gone. Manhattan, she's gone. Her death crystallized my life. I understand that my breathing means something, and that her stillness does, too. These are the ways we walk through the world: fleeting in each other's hearts and trailing absolute sorrow.

I am not sure if it is better or worse to know all that I do, I only know that with death I have come to a new consciousness. I have lost speech and gained the power of deep and introspective thought. I love everything in an odd, reverse object permanence.

Learning that things were still there even when I could not see them was a big step. Learning that things can turn to dust when I am watching, that was everything. I have to understand that my whole world can change when someone else stops breathing. I have to understand that the same could be true for someone else, of my own life.

Thus, I must love all things while they are alive and I can see them breathing with dark health. Thus, I must love quietly; I cannot let the dying understand that they are hurting me with their parting, I cannot add to the eternal pain of the end. That would be a larger cruelty than I could take responsibility for.

It is easier, this way. I was thinking that as I slipped from home and made a slow, unaccompanied, and picking journey to the secret grove. I watched a colt just younger than me kill without proper understanding and understood: I knew something, and though it didn't make me better it made me more of a suffering soul.

I followed the trail, my eyes downcast as I watched beauty turn to blood. The scent of it was more familiar than it should have been--the sight of the roses, too rare. When I drew myself up and closer to the colt (a unicorn not much smaller than I) I had nothing to say. I kept my distance, didn't dare to touch such a violent soul lest he injure my already aching form.

I looked into his blue eyes, much brighter than my those of my crying father, with the gold of my own and felt pity for the creature he had killed.

But I had nothing at all to say.

""