At the edge of habitation, where the seasons are gentle and the winds never so and the sun can’t quite escape the clouds, there is a lake so clear that you can see every pebble it calls child, lined with grass kept short by hungry animals that never see day, grass that skirts the edge and nuzzles into the crystal water so that you can walk in the shallows of the lake and never leave green behind. The lake is too vast to see across, so the horizon is nothing but clouds and breeze and blue.
There are people who spend their life fighting, battling desperately to stay afloat, living for a personal vendetta against the universe and seeking some resolution that they know will never be in their reach. These are the people who never know full sleep, the people who never know a quiet mind.
These are the people who, after every last fragment of their soul is spent, find their rest finally at the edge of this lake. Every person denied a childhood finds youth there. Every person denied a home finds refuge there. Every person who has grasped the universe and wrenched it, with pure determination and desperation and nerve, into a new shape will eventually arrive at the shores of this lake, where showers never fall but the smell of rain never fades and the light never blinds and their first taste of quiet is found.
She found herself there, after a long, longing life on her toes. Decades of computations and designs and forceful solutions fell away from her as she stood on the shores of the lake. The problems were not hers to solve anymore. She could lay her fist and pencil down.
At the lake, you can go for days without seeing a soul. Slumbering in the grass, breeze on your face as your back stretches for the first time in years. Your lungs fill with the rolling scent of sky and mist and memory, so thick you can taste it in your throat, so heavy that it wraps around you like a blanket, soaking into your soul and soothing the pain that lingers in your skull.
And then you walk, bare feet sinking into the soft grass, soil between your toes, smooth stone beneath your heels as you trail through the lake of glass. At first you wobble, step unsure, the rhythm of the world and the planet that’s warm beneath you unfamiliar. But nature whispers to you and you grasp the dance, wisdom and willingness keeping you upright as the cool water twirls around your ankles.
That is how, eventually, you find the others. The home made of windows, open to the sky, white linens and empty spaces and the people who walked the same weary road as you. It is a building of glass, offering nothing except pointless halls to wander and a view of the water. And a place to try to remember how to speak. You forget, out on the shore—speech, like most things, is no longer important there. That is the importance of this place: it is unafraid to give you the nothing that you need.
Most stay, settled into the silence of their fellow veterans, finally sliding into place and fitting, in a way that never seemed possible before. But some keep wandering, tracing the edge of the water and imagining that one day they’ll reach the end of something. These souls sound restless, but do not think that they have been cheated of this place’s relief. They are simply those who find rest in motion. They, too, have in a way found their place on the shores of the lake. They, too, can finally breathe.
She was one who settled, sinking into the grass, eyes on the blue and white and light above her, the currents of the clouds easing her into place. She rediscovers words, and with them, the deliciousness of quiet. Words on the lake are tentative, spoken by souls who used their tongues up long ago. They do not need to speak. They feel enough.
It is a while before she becomes aware of him. He is not one who stays—he never has been, the softness and quiet of the glass corridors too still and gentle for his angry mind. He sets out for days on end, ripples in the water trailing behind him and disturbing the reflection of the stars. But always he comes back. Always he comes back.
She feels no should. There is no should at the lake. But she watches him, and she remembers, and she waits.
One day, she awakes curled up in the grass to find him sitting nearby, waves of green and yellow fluttering around him. He is too far away to look like he meant to be beside her, but close enough that she nonetheless knows that he did. She wonders if he remembers her. He has changed, is decades older than when she knew him, and he carries them like centuries. So do they all. He carries the bruises of self-hatred where she bears the scars of self-sacrifice. He twists inward where she is torn open to the universe.
She sits up, feeling the flatness she leaves behind in the grass with a spread hand. But still it is soft. With him, it will not always be.
Caution whispers to her that he can offer nothing but pain. She knows. This is why she waits for him first.
He gazes out to the water, eyes fixed on infinity, as if struggling to find the impossible distinction between the sky and the sea. She knows then that he has not forgotten her, just as she could never forget him. You do not forget the first thing to teach you pain.
So she does not look away, keeping her view on him, waiting for the unshiftable to shift. After many sunrises and sunsets, he turns, his soul groaning with the effort it takes to move something so heavy with inertia. It’s so slight, so small, and he peers at her only from the corner of his eye. But from him, it is enough. She breathes deeply of the sunlit breeze, swallowing the scent of grass and age and rain, and then speaks.
Her lips and tongue are weary and dry from disuse, but she is still the one who spoke to crowds, who changed minds, who argued with infinity. So her voice comes out clear. She says, I know you.
His voice has gone even longer untouched. It has always been heavy with a strangling exhaustion, a deep heady bitterness against all he is and was and could never become. His voice is one that echoed in lecture halls, cried for recognition, and reverberated within his skull until it spilled out of his throat and swallowed anything sweet around him. So when he speaks, his voice is not clear. It is weary and it trembles through her chest. He says, You used to. But years have gone by.
Did it turn out alright? she asks, like a question she has cradled in her heart for a millennium. He is quiet for a moment, the wind rolling across the waves and up the grass and into his hair. It seems to blow through him, as if he cannot fully be in that place yet. Then he says, Could anything?
Anything of yours, she answers.
No. Nothing of mine.
I’m sorry. Her voice aches, but it has a calm he never heard in it before. I would’ve helped, she tells him. Had you let me.
He is silent, or if he speaks his voice carries in the breeze, caught up in the air that tastes like rainstorm but has never seen a blackened sky. She turns back to the lake, eyes gliding over the still, flat glass. He asks her nothing. She never expected him to, though once, foolishly, she might have hoped.
When she turns back to him, he is gone. She never could have asked for better. Not from him. So she shifts back into the grass and closes her eyes, letting the softness ease her aching and offer her the beginnings of release. She has far more to unwind within herself than just the tangle of him.
It is slow work, silent and steady, the work that they do on the shores of that lake. If somehow you came upon that place without being one of its assigned convalescents, you would not be able to see the careful, patient work they are doing. But still they work, and it is the hardest work of their lives. They are rebuilding themselves. They work with the method of an architect, constructing their own souls into something survivable. They work with the care of a seamstress, slowly patching together their own scars. They work with the detail of a craftsman, carving beauty into their own beings. It unfolds at an aching pace, and it is never finished. But it is good work.
So she sinks and she settles and she soothes, finding her way through the mazes of her own mind, rediscovering things inside herself that she can live with. She labors in her aloneness, and she relearns how to breathe.
It is a long time before she sees him again. The next time, he comes straight towards her, heart hungry for something familiar. He sits down at her side, pulls his knees up to his chest, and fixes his eyes on the invisible horizon of blue.
She knows what he asks for. But there is a glimmer of hesitation in her, the trembling of a child burned long ago who is afraid to use a stove again. This tentative delay comes from something that was built within her without her permission. Because she remembers more than just his face. She remembers that she was the one who had the right to walk away—and that he was the one who did.
It is a selfish memory, and even on the lake, where she has recovered a piece of peace, selfishness never could find purchase within her.
So she puts a hand on his shoulder and he cries.
After hours of tears, his breathing has slowed and his cheeks are dry again. He sits differently now, some faint comfort finally settled within him. The wind no longer blows through him but now tousles his hair and brushes his cheeks and twists warmth and sunlight around him. The clouds are gone from his eyes slightly, though it will be many long months before his sight is as clear as the water before him. But his chest can inflate and deflate and he can sit beside somebody who cares for him. There is a glimmer of sun on the horizon of his soul.
He turns to her fully, finally, deep eyes searching for something in her waiting face. He wets his lips, trying to fight down the hoarseness of the ages, and says to her, I’m sorry.
She had never expected to hear those words from him.
Something within her dissolves, splashing into her stomach like the rain that lingers at the edges of the lake. She wants to pull him into warmth and gratitude, but the correct words catch in her throat, choking her. Her eyes slip away from his. You hurt me, she murmurs instead.
I know. I’m sorry.
Why? I never understood.
He has no answer for her, and his silence makes her sit, watching the sky and tasting the petrichor. That is not what he meant for her to hear. He has no answer because no answer could justify the wounds he left on her. So he pulls her close, cradling her head against his chest and filling her with warmth that mirrors the golden sunlight dancing across the waters. She closes her eyes and accepts this as her answer.
After that, they do their slow, painstaking work together, their careful, tedious efforts, their measured labor of love. They uncover hidden networks within each other, webs of longing and compassion and thought. He learns how to care for someone outside himself. She learns what it is to be cared for. They teach each other, in the waves of grass and water that adorn their days.
The nights are when their words come out, the angry words and the lonely words, the adoring words and the loaded words, the words new to their lips and the words they’ve carried within them for years.
He finally asks her, in the darkness of the night, when she is only a silhouette against the stars and only their voices across the breeze. He turns to her, her chin tilted up to the heavens, and asks, What about you?
What about me? she asks, her smile audible.
Did it turn out alright? he echoes.
Oh, she sighs. Some things did. Most did not. She opens her mouth but stops before her words touch the air, searching for his face in the dark. He hears the hesitation.
But?
But I changed the world.
Ah. He closes his eyes. The wind off the water twists through his hair. You were always going to. I always knew that.
Then why . . . She tilts her face away from him, casting it in shadow. Never mind.
They sit in the silence, finding that it is not so silent. The water trickles back and forth over its bed, and the wind murmurs slightly in their ears, and the grass flutters and rustles around them. The night air scrapes across their skin, warm and full and wonderful.
I never stopped searching for you, you know, she says.
Oh?
Never. Even when I knew you would not be found. Sometimes I searched for you in other things, or I searched for you in other people, but always I searched for you.
He is silent for a while. Then he says, you could never have found me.
No, she agrees. You did not want to be found. But I couldn’t help it. I missed you.
He traces the sky with his eyes, following the arcing paths of the stars. They are so numerous you can barely see the black anymore, a splattering of soul color against a deep inky backdrop, spilled beads of glittering glass against infinity.
I never stopped running from you, he admits.
She always knew that, though she doesn’t say it, for his sake.
It had to just be me, he tries to explain. I . . . I couldn’t . . .
It cannot be articulated, so he gives up. He couldn’t suffer with her beside him. He couldn’t curl up on himself, eat himself alive, bear the universe on his shoulders alone, not if she was right there beside him, ready to carry everything he bore and more. In life, he had his own trial to fight, and she could not fight it for him. Sitting on the shores of the lake, he suddenly wasn’t sure if it had been good for him to bear it alone. But either way, he had to bear it. It had to be just him. And he couldn’t have done it with her.
I understand, she says, and there is sorrow in her finally understanding.
Yes. You understand.
They sit in the grass and watch the rose glow of dawn crawl across the sky. As the blue of day arrives, the heavens open, and the rain comes.