ultima

“Were you happy? Is it a crime to be happy? Is that what’s stupid about it? I was stupid, too,” she said, the words thick and slow like honey in her mouth, but far from sweet. (Or maybe they were, and she’d simply forgotten the taste.) She wasn’t even sure it was her mouth that had spoken, though the voice was certainly hers; her questions had the innocence and the peculiar intensity trademarked by children, and at his feet, staring up into his hooded eyes, a child she was. A pretty child. A fairly well-mannered one, too, if demanding. That was all she had ever been and it was all she had ever aspired to be. Flatland, carrying on in every direction, glorying in its flatness.

But now there were mountains, thrown up by plates shifting beneath her feet. “You cannot go back.” Now she knew the word ‘ocean’, “You can only move forward,” and she understood with frightening clarity that the true nature of the earthquake that broke her heart was the joy she found in the syllables. 

Stunned was a euphemism, but of course she was stunned. To pick up the pieces of your own nest and fit them back together, only to realize you’d compensated for lost parts with new ones, strange ones – to find that those new parts were happiness openly challenging the happiness you had before, as spring challenges the earth to begin again, similar to last year but still different— That was terrible, wasn’t it? It was frightening, wasn’t it, to realize that in spite of all fear, in your bones you were destined to seek and love change? “But I don’t want to,” she thought, burrowing tightly into her distress, folding smaller and smaller and smaller, “I don’t know how to, I, I don’t—I don’t—”

This time, she knew it was her mouth.

Her head snapped up swiftly, a single teardrop clinging to the lashes of her startled eyes as they found his. The little confessions hung between them like old fireworks, leaving ghost trails in the dark. For what felt like a year she was still as porcelain, gaze locked to his, that teardrop bobbing, bobbing. In her chest that heart seized, released, seized again. And then she blinked— The teardrop flew—

And it was gone.

Up to that moment, she’d had the nagging suspicion that this, too, was only a dream. Dreams spoke honestly, if one cared to listen; the man who’d been a steady testament to her wonder and her fear might have been a manifestation of the truths she carried, someone of the same breed and kind as the crocodile in her, though decidedly more gentle. Looking out over the fields now, though, she had to wonder.

“I hope,” she said at last, the introduction of some grand statement that in the concluding would decide for both of them. But she couldn’t finish it. Her mouth was open just so, mind as wide and empty and full, just like the night. I hope: what? I hope: for whom? I hope: why? Ah, she thought, mouth closing.

Finding his eyes again, Ultima smiled, delicate, but steady as starlight. 

“I hope.” 

And that was all.