Love in the Forgetting
There are, Miri had found, very few adequate frameworks for what it feels like to love someone you carry a deep memory of without remembering them.
It was not the ordinary experience of love, which is the experience of becoming gradually certain of something that was initially uncertain. It was not, on the other hand, the certainty she felt about Edith and the work — a certainty that was earned, traceable, made of specific experiences laid one on another. It was something in between and beyond both: a certainty that had no traceable source in her current life and yet felt more basic than most of the things that did have traceable sources. As though the knowledge of Fin existed in her at a level below the level that this life had built.
She would not call it fate, because she was careful about words, and fate implied a compulsion she did not feel. She had chosen this life — she knew that, in the wordless but absolute way she knew the things that had survived the forgetting — and she had chosen it in part because Fin would be here, and Fin had chosen it knowing she would be here, and the particularity of that choice was, if anything, the opposite of compulsion. It was the most free thing she could imagine: to choose limitation for the sake of what you could do within it, including the specific form of knowing someone only incompletely, only through the medium of time and experience, only through the slow accumulation of a shared life.
She told him this one evening in February, standing in his studio, not as a declaration — declarations were not her mode — but because the thought had arrived at a level of clarity that required saying aloud.
"I think," she said, looking at the half-finished object on the table rather than at him, "that we chose to do this together. Not just the work. The whole of it. This particular life."
He was quiet for a moment with the quality of quiet that meant he was taking something seriously rather than deflecting it. "How do you know?" he said.
"The way I know other things I can't trace to a source in this life. The way I know ereveth meant what it meant before Edith told me. Not deduction. Just — it's there."
Another quiet. "I have always felt that too," he said. "I thought it was the ordinary kind of feeling, the kind that people explain away with psychology or attachment or whatever the current framework is. I thought I was confusing familiarity with something bigger."
"And now?"
"Now I think the familiarity is something bigger. I think that's what familiarity is when it's real — recognition, not just pattern-matching." He looked up at her. "Though I want to say this carefully, because I know you're careful about these things: I'm not certain I'm not just explaining what I want to believe."
She felt the warmth in her chest that was specific to him saying things she had not expected him to say — things that demonstrated that he had been thinking about something with the same quality of care she brought to it, independently, without her needing to lead him there. "That's exactly the right kind of uncertainty to have," she said.
"High praise from you."
"The highest." She looked at him finally, directly. "I think we are supposed to do this together. I also think we have to choose it anyway, in this life, as though we didn't know. Because the choice is the thing. The choosing is what makes it real."
He looked at her for a long moment. "Miri," he said.
"Yes."
"I would choose it anyway."
She felt the truth of his saying it with the sael-miren quality she brought to everything now — heard the intention underneath the words, heard the absence of performance, heard the clean sound of something meant entirely. "I know," she said. "I know you would. So would I."
They stood in the studio, which had sael-meren in every beam and joint of it — Fin's three years of true attending had built it into the bones — and the February wind came in off the harbor and the harbor was its particular February grey-green and the objects on Fin's worktable were in various stages of becoming what they were, and nothing happened except that two people stood together in the same room and were honest.
Which is, in the arithmetic of the important things, a very great deal.
The difficulty, which came later — several months later, in the summer, when they had been what people call together for long enough that certain habits of being were established — was the specific challenge of loving a person who hears intentions.
"You always know what I mean," he said one evening. He said it without complaint, but with the particular flatness that precedes an honest attempt to say something difficult.
"I try not to hear past what you're telling me," she said.
"I know. That's the thing — you try. But I can feel when you already know what I'm going to say before I've finished saying it, and it's — strange. Not bad. Just strange. Like living with someone who can see in the dark."
She sat with this. It was fair. She had thought about it before — the asymmetry of her gift in an intimate relationship, the way sael-miren hearing could, if she was not careful, substitute for the actual experience of someone gradually revealing themselves. The risk of shortcutting the process of coming to know someone by simply perceiving what was there without waiting for it to be given.
"Tell me what you want," she said.
"I want you to be surprised sometimes. Even if you're not really." He paused. "That sounds foolish."
"No, it doesn't. It sounds like someone who wants the experience of being discovered, not just known." She thought for a moment. "I think what you're asking for is what aleveth means — the attending that wants to see rather than to know. You want me to look at you as though you might still be becoming, rather than already arrived."
"Is that — I don't know if that's the same thing I mean, but it sounds right."
"It's what I should already be doing," she said. "Knowing what someone intends doesn't mean knowing who they are. Intentions change. You are not the sum of your intentions, even your deepest ones. You are also what you do, and what you make, and what you choose when the intentions aren't clear even to you." She reached across and took his hand. "I will practice looking at you as though you might surprise me. Because you do, actually. The gift doesn't remove surprise. It adds a layer to it."
He turned his hand to hold hers. "How?"
"Because I can hear when you mean something you don't know you mean yet. And then I wait to see what you do with it. That part — what you do — I can't predict. That's you."
He was quiet with this in the way he was quiet with structural problems: holding it, examining it, looking for the load-bearing element. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I think I understand that."
"You might not," she said. "We might need to come back to it."
"We probably will," he said, which was the most honest possible response, and which she loved him for, and which she told him she loved him for, and which led to the kind of conversation that goes on much longer than either participant expects and ends with both of them feeling that something has been resolved that neither of them could have named clearly at the start.
The question she could not ask him — the one she held privately, examining it in the way she examined difficult things, without forcing a resolution before the resolution was ready — was the question of what happened to a love that had been chosen before memory and would be forgotten between lives.
She held this for months. She took it to Edith, finally, on a February evening that felt like a deliberate echo of the first February she had sat in this kitchen with the blue notebook and the sea-glass turn of a word she could not translate.
"What happens," she asked, "to the things we love, when we forget them?"
Edith made tea with her usual unhurried focus. "What kind of thing are you actually asking?"
"I'm asking about Fin. About what this becomes when the life ends and we return and we forget." She paused. "I know the answers to some versions of this question. I know that the specific memories won't survive the passage. I know that what survives is the general warmth — the shape of what was learned without the specific events. But I want to know whether the love survives. Whether the particular love, which is particular because it knows this particular person in this particular way, is — diminished, or lost, or carried."
Edith sat down across from her with the cups between them, and was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was choosing between a true answer and a comfortable one and there was no version that combined both.
"What the tradition says," she said finally, "is that love practiced truly — love that is aleveth, that attends to the other rather than to its own need for the other — does not require memory to persist. That what you build in a life of genuine love is not stored in memory, because memory is not where it was built. It was built in the shape of who you become through the loving. And that shape — like the shape of the language, like the undertone — persists through the passage in the way that character persists. Not as a specific thing you can name, but as a way of being."
Miri looked at the table. "But he won't persist. This particular version of him. The one who holds his work like a question he's answering."
"No," Edith said, with the honesty that was also a form of love. "This version will not. He will have other versions, in other lives, and you will likely know those too, in other configurations, and the love will be different because both of you will be different. It is not the same love, carried forward. It is love — the capacity for it, the disposition toward it — carried forward and finding new expression."
"That is not as comforting as I would like it to be," Miri said.
"No," Edith agreed. "It is only true." She put her hand on Miri's briefly. "But consider what it means about the love you have now. It is not practice. It is not a fragment. It is complete. This love, in this life, is full — not despite the forgetting that is coming, but partly because of it. The limitation makes it real. That was the first thing you told yourself before you came."
Miri sat with this in the way she sat with the things she could not quite resolve, not trying to close it prematurely, not trying to perform equanimity she didn't feel, but letting the truth of it do whatever work it needed to do.
Outside, the February harbor was dark and cold and very present.
She was here. He was here. The work was real and the love was real and the forgetting would be real in turn, and none of these things cancelled each other out.
That was the deal. She had agreed to it, knowingly, before the first breath.
She found, to her slight surprise, that she still agreed.