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| Details |
| Author: | Mishell |
| Summary: | A letter from Icaros to Paluuva, two days after their meeting in the Blue Recluse. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Chain: Exes and Woes
Paluuva,
I told you that whatever you were not willing to teach me, I would try to work through on my own, and I meant it.
I have tried to reason through what you would require in an apology. My hypothesis is that the required apology would consist of two parts: 1) proper feeling and 2) proper execution. If my hypothesis is correct, then I am incapable of delivering what you require. The feelings involved in a proper apology are now beyond my reach.
Do not mistake this for recalcitrance on my part (at least not now). These are the unavoidable limitations of my current state of existence. I have memories of emotions such as guilt, remorse, and regret (even the subtle shadings of difference between them), but I no longer have access to those cognitive mechanisms. Consider, as a metaphor, a man whose vocal cords were cut by an enemy. While unable to vocalize, he might perfectly recall the melody, lyrics, and even the precise feeling of performing a certain song. The metaphor is not exact, as this mute man would feel intense grief and longing for those lost experiences, and in my case these are the very cords that have been cut.
Therefore, I cannot give you what you desire. Nor, ironically, could the man I was in life, for different reasons. I have lost what prevented him from apologizing (pride), but I have also lost the feeling required to make that action "ring true" to you, no matter how flawlessly I might perform it.
I have spent some time analyzing this unfortunate irony, and I may have a partial solution. It is based in part on my ruminations regarding the way that my soul was separated from my body and then "stitched" back to it via necromancy. My soul is no longer truly connected to my body, but soul and body are close enough to one another spatially that a certain sympathetic resonance is achieved between the former spiritual identity and the nervous system with which it was once intertwined.
By this mechanism I can perform a reasonable facsimile of life. Reasonable enough that you could sit so near to me and still manage to forget that I am dead, become angry that I do not intuit, do not feel, attribute to me the same willfulness that made me void of compassion when I was capable of it.
I cannot present to you an organically whole apology, but perhaps I can stitch what I felt before my death to the words I am capable of speaking thereafter. Perhaps their proximity can resonate, can animate the apology into a semblance of what you need it to be.
I can tell you of a memory I would never have shared in life: of a day - several months after you asserted that we would never see one another again - when I finally truly understood what had transpired between us.
I can tell you of the sudden sharp pain that seized me. It was nothing so trivial as a simple craving for your presence or a sudden palpable lack of a thing I had become accustomed to. We had always endured much longer absences from one another, with little trouble.
Nor was it even the prospect of facing millennia of life without ever again enjoying our shared connection, though I remember feeling sadness about that, as well.
That pain was, simply put, remorse. I belatedly arrived at a keen understanding of what I ought to have given you and how easy it would have been. I became aware that my life had been briefly graced by something beautiful and valuable, and that nothing but my own foolishness had robbed me of it.
I weighed possible actions in response to this feeling, and never arrived with any certainty at a decision. I took so long about it that the remorse had time to fade, and with great relief I let it slip away entirely. I told myself that you had likely long since forgotten your anger.
It seems you have not.
And so I put now in writing the ideas that haunted the mind of a man now dead. I offer you what mourners of a dead man so seldom receive: answers to questions that died with him.
I loved you. In that moment, and in many that came after, I felt keenly that my cowardice and indecision had cost me a partner that might have given meaning to what remained of my nomadic, rootless life in arcanely castrated exile. I became aware in that moment that I had given you not even a fragment of what you deserved, and that I had lost far more than you had when you walked away.
And I was deeply, wretchedly sorry.
I will not lie to you and say that I am sorry now. Dishonesty is not the foundation on which I would like to build whatever remains for us as colleagues and allies. But I am no longer ashamed to say that I was sorry, until the day I died. I am no longer ashamed to say that I wept more than once and knew myself for a fool. I have no attachment to the pride of a dead man, and may speak as ill of him as the situation warrants.
Having no pride, nor any sense of decency that would prevent me from asking more of one who already gave more than I deserved, all that remains for me now is to entreat you to summon one final act of generosity from a well I once believed infinite - and after all these years, forgive me.
Icaros