The Bones of Grace

The Last True Story

I went to the place of dreams, Elijah, the place of otherness. I want to say I remained in the rational and saw nothing, but I have been unable to wash out the conviction that I dreamed of you the whole time I was unconscious. In the place of otherness, it was your face I saw, you sitting beside my hospital bed, holding my hand so that the pulse at your wrist galloped steadily beside mine, your breath against my skin as you kissed my bruised forehead. It was only a few hours, but, to my mind on the other side, it seemed far, far longer, years, time measured as it was in the age of Ambulocetus.

The age of Ambulocetus was forty-nine million years ago, after the Indian subcontinent crashed into Asia, creating the Himalayas and sealing off the mighty Tethys. Even then, Ambulocetus still clung to her hind legs, allowing her a few hours on shore every day to lie by the sea and catch the sun that beat down on the northern Asian plateau. But it was in the sea that she was at home, unlike her ancestor, Pakicetus, who remained in the shallows, her grazing water only knee-deep. And down through the generations, Ambulocetus’s descendants became bolder, travelling to deeper and wider waters, their snouts elongating, their hind feet becoming webbed, their front teeth narrowing to catch prey underwater.

The story of Ambulocetus is the story becoming, of transformation, of leaping between one sort of being and another sort of being, of leaving history behind for the wide swathe of the possible. It is not the story of extinction. Ambulocetus is no Mastodon, vanished from the earth with the snap of evolution’s hand; no, her story is of the rather slower sort, as, generation by generation, she leaves behind the hoofed foot and short snout of the Mesonychid, over time developing the curved bones in her ears that will allow those who tug at her grave to read her like a hieroglyph: here lies a whale, a creature who lives and eats and breathes by the ocean’s heartbeat.

I had been injured by a piece of the crate as it broke apart. It was a knock on the head, stitches, a slight concussion, and a fractured elbow. There would be many tests, back in Dhaka, to make sure there had been no permanent damage, but they would all reveal the same thing: that I’d had a lucky escape, given that I had foolishly rushed towards the piano as everyone else had scattered.

It was not you at my bedside. It was not your voice in my head, crying, ‘My girl, my girl.’ That was my father. It was not your hand in my hand. That was my mother. And it was not your breath on my face, kissing my bruised forehead. That was Rashid.

Mo. When I peeled open my eyes, I called out his name, and they said, when you are better, you can see him. I closed my eyes again, willing them to be gone, willing them to be the dream and you the real after the dream. But when I looked again, there they all were, so selfish in their worry for me. I was hardly injured. At least, not in the common way.

I was in a government hospital. The room, the best they had, was bare except for my bed and the three chairs that seated my family. It smelled of urine and antiseptic. There was no window, only a flickering tube light fixed to the wall.

I woke up again in the darkness and I screamed and screamed until the doctor arrived with a needle and so I pulled out the IV, and then my father said, ‘Let’s take her; she has to find out anyway.’

I remember the rest vividly. On the other side of the hospital, in a room with two beds, lay Mo. On the second bed was a girl with a shaved head. They were both sleeping, and unlike me in pyjamas my mother had brought from home, they were in hospital gowns that were too large, their arms protruding like cherry stems. There was a monitor that beeped intermittently. Mo’s chest rose and fell.

Their faces, untouched, were perfect.

‘There are internal injuries,’ the doctor explained.

‘Can you operate?’

‘Profound injuries,’ he said.

I pulled back the sheet. Mo’s legs were bandaged all the way up to his thighs, and around his midriff there was a large bloodstain. ‘The dressing needs to be changed,’ I said.

‘Profound injuries,’ the doctor repeated. Abboo put his arm delicately around my shoulder and I flinched, feeling a wound where there wasn’t one. Mo had been smuggling himself out of the country in the crate. (To you, Elijah.) He heard the piano was being shipped to America, and he wanted to go. And with him, in the crate, was a girl. They were trying to locate her family, but no one had heard of her. She wasn’t from the beach and she wasn’t from the town. Maybe it was his friend, the girl he said he wanted to marry. When he grew up. Which would now be never.

*

On the second day, a man came to the door and said his name was Anwar. ‘You are not Megna,’ Anwar said.

I was unmoved. Nothing could surprise me now. A boy had packed himself into a crate to be with you. I had loved you and been loved in return, and yet I was not with you, I was here, in this blue and white room.

‘Who are you?’ That was Rashid. I gestured for him to let the man speak, my arm weighed down by a thick padding of bandages.

Anwar approached me, getting closer than a man like him could hope to get to a woman like me, until I could see the ridges on his forehead, the plateaued calluses on his palm as he waved his hand over me, disbelieving.

‘She was my sister,’ I managed. Then I was crying. ‘She was my sister.’ And he was crying too, his features collapsing together in the middle of his face, covered finally by that callused hand. Someone pulled him away and ushered him out of the room, and I drifted again to the place of dreams, of otherness, of you.

All the time I was lying in that hospital bed, Ammoo whispered into my ear. Telling me how sorry she was to have kept the truth from me, that I was going to come home now and it would all be put right. The silence would be shattered. The unsayable would be voiced. We would find my mother. We would retrace her steps. We would search up and down the country.

On the third day, they let Anwar return. We talked and talked, or rather, he talked, and I listened. Hours passed. I shared a piece of banana bread with him, a gift from Komola. That’s when he told me my mother was dead. Before I could grieve for her, which I did with the barest sense of what I was mourning, they told me that Mo had died in the night. They had switched off the machines. Did I want to see him? I shook my head. I had said my farewell the day before, when I had taken the soles of his feet and pressed them against my cheek and begged him to forgive me because I knew he had only loved you because I had led the way, because I had suggested to him that his wishes could grow that big, out of the beach, beyond the country, to a place of pianos and cold winters and childhood.

The doctor said I should be transferred to a private hospital in Dhaka. I needed an orthopaedic surgeon to set my arm properly. Anyway, I was taking a bed. Someone might need it. I refused to be discharged. They replaced the IV and gave me sedatives and I slept and slept.

On the sixth day, Anwar brought the girl to my bedside, and he told me this girl, whose name was Shona, was Megna’s daughter and his daughter. And he told me the story of the woman he had once loved and left behind.

She hid behind his legs so I had no idea if she resembled me. ‘Come here,’ I said, my voice like a broken glass bottle. She remained behind her father but she extended her hand to me and I grasped the tips of her fingers. Again I cried. Again my mother whispered into my ear. My mother was dead. My mother loved me. My mother was a shit-poor woman from nowhere. I had a twin sister. My sister had a daughter. My sister’s daughter was also my daughter. On the seventh day, these were the words that came to my lips.

‘My sister’s daughter is my daughter.’ I looked at the three people who were the closest in the world to me. Holding my hand. Blowing prayers over my face. Whispering tender words into my ears. My sister was a prostitute because Anwar had abandoned her to build a skyscraper in Dubai and she had nowhere to go and when she had died, her daughter had been sold and Mo had tried to rescue her and now here this girl was, hiding behind her father’s legs, the father who had abandoned her mother, my sister, the woman with my face who had died of a broken heart.

Dolly, who had pointed out the ugliness of my history, had no idea how ugly it really was.

‘My sister’s daughter is my daughter,’ I repeated.

Rashid said: ‘She could be anyone.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s mine. Can’t you see?’ I closed my eyes and pictured the girl, who had finally emerged from behind her father and stood by my bedside in a cheap blue dress. Through the pain on the side of my head and the ache in my arm and the unbearable pain of waking up and finding that you were not at my bedside, I experienced a sweet, unpunctuated joy. I know who I am now, Elijah. I saw it the moment I looked into her face. I am her, and she is me. The restless being is at peace at last. Rumi said: look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that.

‘I want to take her home,’ I said. We were alone; my parents had quietly left the room as I had expressed my demand and Rashid his reservations.

‘She has a father,’ Rashid said. ‘She belongs with him.’

‘No,’ I argued. ‘She’s mine.’

Anwar had given the girl to me. He had brought her to me and said that she should come home with us, because he had nothing and we would give her a life. Ammoo and Abboo had looked at each other, Bibles of words passing silently between them, and nodded. Only Rashid pointed out how strange this would make our family.

‘I’ve decided,’ I said.

Rashid had not left my bedside since the accident, and the strain was showing, the lower half of his face obscured by stubble. ‘Wait till you’re better,’ he said, lightly caressing the small strip of my skin between my hairline and the bandage. They had shaved my head there, I knew, and put in seventeen stitches.

‘She looks like me,’ I said.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said, his hand resting on my shoulder, running the soft pad of his thumb along my collarbone.

‘You wanted to be a father.’

‘Yes, to our child.’

‘This can be our child.’

He folded his hands on his lap and looked up at the murmuring light of the fluorescent bulb. A nurse entered and checked the level of fluid in my drip. We waited until the adjustment had been made, one bag exchanged for another.

Finally, he said, ‘Zee, it’s too much randomness.’

‘Take it or leave it,’ I said, refusing to make my case. ‘She comes with me.’

And he said, ‘I choose you, Zee, but you can’t expect me to take a stranger into my house. My parents wouldn’t have it.’

In that moment, I was free of him. There was no turning back from this: his declaration of her as a stranger was also an objection to me, to the randomness of me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t love a man who wouldn’t take this girl into his heart, but that he was making it clear he could only love the piece of me he could imagine, the piece he could know. The mystery of me, my alienness, would always be at best obscured, something to ferret away in shame.

Perhaps it was already too late for Rashid and me — too late the moment I met you, Elijah. And I should be sorry, perhaps, that this is what it took for me to see that Rashid and I could never be together. But if you are reading this, if I have done my job, you will know that it was never going to be enough that I loved you. It would have to be that the whole rotation of the world, my world, shifted ever so slightly, so that everything that seemed acceptable, everything that seemed inevitable, would suddenly become loathsome to me. And that is what happened. A bruise on the forehead. A bruise on the brain. A fallen girl who was my girl, my other, bearing the weight of all the missing fragments of my history.

Ambulocetus was not alone in her day. She had contemporaries: Takracetus, Gaviocetus, Dalanistes — each of these may have been the ancestor of the whale as we know it. Or it could have been another altogether, a genus yet to be discovered. What we do know is that the whale was first a coyote, then a water-curious amphibian, and, finally, the creature that would rule the seas and become the stuff of our myths, our ocean-totems, our outstanding beast, the one who reminds us that long before our time, beings were made on a grander scale, their bones as big as cities. The whale is the fragment of that grandeur, of life writ on a canvas so large it is almost beyond the imagination. And for this to have happened, a transgression had to be committed, an abandonment of limbs, an adventure into water, and the courage to bid farewell to the past, whatever such voyaging may have cost, whatever longings and loves were left behind in the rubble.

Shona and Abboo and Ammoo and I went home together, the four of us a mottled tribe. I said goodbye to Rashid at the hospital. I was hollowed out, numb from all that had happened, so I told him with a dead voice that it was over and he gave me a look of disbelief — it made him feel better, I think, to assume I’d taken leave of my senses. I saw him a few times after that, but we had less and less to say to each other, and finally, about a year later, in front of the same Kazi who had married us, we signed our names again in the black register and were divorced.

Those first weeks with Shona were the hardest. I thought she would cry, that she would ask for Mo, or her father, or someone from her past, but she didn’t speak a word to us on the long ride home, all the way down the Dhaka— Chittagong highway, through the city, and past the gates of the apartment building and up the elevator. When we entered, she only gave a small hint of the vast distance between this place and all the other places she had called home by pulling at her eyelashes, a gesture I would come to know as one that conveyed extreme distress. Ammoo took over the care of her. She knew, instinctively, what to do, putting Shona in the bed with her and making sure the rest of us kept our distance, especially Abboo. In the morning we found them curled around each other like human and cat. A strand of Ammoo’s hair was in Shona’s fist. I was desperate to question her about Mo, to ask where she had met him and how they had come to be in that crate together, but she could barely look at me, her eyes perpetually sweeping the mosaic floor.

Eventually we took her to see a doctor, and there were injuries, ones that pre-dated the accident, that would take their time to heal. It would be impossible for me to accurately describe the recriminations that we all silently carried with us from the moment Shona arrived, all the guilt, responsibility, self-hating that we experienced as we wondered about her life. Shona told us nothing about her mother. She sat at the table and refused to eat. She wet the bed again and again. We made the mistake of putting her in school, believing the company of other children might do her some good, but she was sent home after the first week, having spat at the teacher and punched another girl.

I had to confront, again, the fact that I would never know anything about my mother. I searched in Shona’s face for a sign of myself, and I saw that her lips, the particular angle of them when she was angry, or smiled (rare, that), mimicked my own, and her incisors, like mine, were sharp and slightly crooked. Aside from that, she gave away nothing, said nothing.

Bettina is doing research on a group of transgender environmentalists in Nepal. She says we are in the age of Anthropocene, when humans rule the world, dictate the conditions and possibilities of life, shorten or lengthen the survival of the planet. The erasure of nature is a cynical thing, to be sure, but looked at in another light, we can say that, for a moment, until the world collapses, we live on a planet shaped by humans. Not by nature, not by time, or history, or dinosaurs, but by us.

Bettina has inspired me to write this:

Fatema Ansar, My Mother

Fatema Ansar’s dreams were too big for her life. Which is to say, her life demanded a small set of dreams, or, better yet, no dreams at all. If she had been one of those people who accepted her fate without a word of protest, who rationalised her poverty, if she said it had all been written on her forehead before she was even born, so that to rail to against it would not just be futile, but against the natural order of things, she might have lived a happier life. She might have lived. Instead, she had thoughts. She lay awake at night when the moon was full and put her on stage like a spotlight, and she would imagine all the other lives she might have had. That she might go to school someday, that she might leave the village and go to Mymensingh town, that she might marry and have daughters who would also learn the numbers and the letters, that she might die with a smile on her lips, satisfied she had done something to advance herself in the world. But, modest though this set of possibilities may sound, for Fatema Ansar, they were poison, because Fatema’s life happened at the very heel of fate. There was nothing to absorb even the smallest dream for a girl like her.

It began with some promise. There was no school — her parents were too poor for that — but she did marry a man who by all accounts would have probably turned out to be not so bad, who would have kept her in food and clothes and might even have given her the occasional tender glance as the years softened him, had he not been bitten by a snake a few months after the wedding, which was nothing more than a kazi reciting a few prayers over their heads and the same food they ate every day, and after that first night, when he had made love to her with violence and held her tightly to his chest, telling her he had put a son in her womb, he left for the East, because the harvest was poor and he had sold himself to a farmer in Khulna for the spring planting, and they said goodbye in the hush of the hut they shared with his parents and his three younger sisters. And all through the months of Ashar, Srabon, and Poush, she waited, her pregnancy showing early, and when the news came that he had died where he fell, that the farmer was sorry but his body could not be sent home, the expense was too great, his parents turned on Fatema, and in the eye of their grief, their only son and their only hope dead in the bloom of his life, they said, ‘Go, you are no longer eating our rice.’ The heel of fate. And she went home, home to her parents, who had been cursed, as had her in-laws, with an abundance of daughters, one of whom they had sent to Dhaka to work as a servant, not a choice now for Fatema, because she would be saddled with this fatherless child, and that is when her sister sent word. That there was a family. God had not blessed them with an issue. Would she? Could she? Her parents sat silent over their empty fields and accused her of being hungry, as if the enormous bulk of her pregnancy was the food she was stealing from their plates. When the babies came — yes, there were two — she despaired. Girls. The heel of fate. Would they take them both? Yes, they would. They came to the village in a car, their pockets bulging with money. And, just as she was about to hand them over, as she passed one and was about to pass the other, the smaller one, her shoulders pulled away from the transaction, and she said, ‘This one I will keep.’ There were arguments, her parents came out of their hut and pleaded with her, but Fatema’s dreams were bigger than her life, and she stood resolute, numbing the pain of losing one with the consolation of the other, imagining a world in which she would never have to give up a child because she was hungry, and she tied the money to her sari and took the smaller one away from the village and to the East, where her husband had died, not knowing if she would find the place he was buried, but pulled there by the force of her will, and the farmer, sorry for her, had offered her to the imam, who had given her a small room behind the mosque, and that is where she settled, a woman alone with a child, dreams too big for her life, the first act of will she had ever committed giving her a small measure of happiness. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

In the absence of knowledge, I choose imagination. I choose to know my mother through my dreams, and the words that come from my dreams. I can draw a picture and then inflate it so that it resembles a life, a history, something I can hold on to. In the age of the Anthropocene, the human rules, and there is nothing more human than to dream.

Of my sister, I knew slightly more, because of Anwar (and because of me — I knew, had always known, exactly what she looked like). He tells me that when she had believed she was accompanying him to Dubai, she had said she would like to swim in the sea and have her foot brush against a large creature, a timi. ‘Timi’ is the Bangla word for ‘whale’. My sister, too, would have searched for Ambulocetus. Perhaps we would have travelled to Dera Bugti together, befriended Zamzam together. Perhaps we would have both fallen in love with you. Never mind, I love you enough for both of us, now that I have fallen in love with you twice and lost you twice and had a twin who has died, making my hopes twice that, you see, of a normal person’s.

We tried to remain together, but looking back, it was obvious from the start that it would not be enough to try and become a family when all there was to connect us was a desire, however earnest, to make amends for the past. After four months, we called Anwar and asked if he might like to see his daughter. Perhaps she could stay with him for a while, see if it suited her. We travelled back down the country to Anwar’s village in Khulna. I was afraid his wife would refuse to take her in, but when we arrived Shona appeared to relax, squatting on a piri and sifting through the rice with Anwar’s mother. We left her there with a measure of satisfaction in our hearts, even though the separation was a complicated one. My mother, especially, struggles with the notion that certain barriers cannot be overcome by will alone. And I had to confront the fact that, even though something of the mystery of my life has now been solved, the fundamental aloneness of it will always be with me, like a scar that flattens and fades but refuses to disappear.

We visit her often. They come to our house for Eid every year and we sit around the table like a family and eat vermicelli and halwa. Anwar’s wife tells me she wishes to have a child, but one has not come along yet. I can’t say that we are intimate, in the way I imagined we might be. They hold themselves at a distance, expecting, perhaps, that our bond will break apart as abruptly as it materialised. But I live in hope that someday, perhaps when age and circumstance narrow with time, we will achieve an easier connection. I had a small glimmer of this when I asked Anwar to tell me his story. I wanted to know exactly how he had come to be on the beach that day, and he was surprisingly willing. We sat together last winter, and I wrote it down exactly as he told it.

There is the rest of the world, which seems very far away now. If you have read the newspapers, you will know that Ghulam Azam has died, that the country my parents love so deeply is as troubled as it has ever been, but also that it exists in a sort of ecstatic state, an escape artist overcoming, with only seconds to spare, every catastrophe that befalls it.

Shona is twelve now. Mo, whose age I had never asked, would have probably been something of a teenager.

I don’t think of you all the time, Elijah. But I remember you on the cusp of every major event in my life. On the day I moved out of my parents’ apartment (a scandal, I should tell you, that I should be simultaneously divorced and living alone). On the anniversary of Mo’s death. I think about the fact that if I were dying, I would want to be with you. I would want to know what words you would say to comfort me. How you would love me through something like that. When I look back I realise so much of the time I spent with you was spent thinking about death, yours or mine or my parents’ or the seed that perished in my body, or even death on a catastrophic scale — that is, the extinction of the species, like Ambulocetus, someday all to be bones in the ground — but that’s what happens I suppose when you fall in love, because suddenly there is a thread connecting your life and all the lives that went before you and all the lives that will follow. Even when we were together I was filled with a sense of dread, not for the parting that would inevitably occur, but simply because I had a periscope into life, the vast and intimate sadness of it, for the first time, and that this is why I loved you, because even the worst of the world was there to be discovered together, shoulder to shoulder with you, my beloved stranger.

Diana is incomplete. The parts of her that arrived safely — her ankles, her pelvis, some vertebrae, the upper half of her ribcage — were assembled by Suzanne and I and these fragments lie before us in all their broken splendour. She is about ten feet long, and would have weighed between seven and eight hundred pounds. Her spine, as we had imagined, is semi-flexible; her pelvis tells us that she ventured only so far into the water. I look at her bones and they are my talismans, reflecting the future and the past, the lives of animals that came before and after her, and, more intimately, the people I have loved and lost: Mo, and Zamzam, and my sister Megna, and my mother, and you, Elijah, most of all. Everything that endures is in the atavism of her bones, fifty million years of history encased in calcium, iron, and sediment. Perhaps my mysterious friend will send me the rest, perhaps not. In his last package, however, he included the handwritten letter from Zamzam that had started it all:

I will not have a burial, comrade. I will die unmarked, and you will only hear of my death in the whispering of trees. You will never gaze on my lifeless form. But, as if you were preparing my body, washing and wrapping me in the white shroud, take these bones which are the echoes of God, and send them to my friend, who will care for them and ensure their proper place in the chronicle of humans and animals.

Remember, Elijah, how the first words we spoke to each other seemed so arbitrary at the time. Aristotle was an orphan, you said. Well, it was Aristotle, sailing in the Aegean, who first distinguished whales from fish. And later, it was the Arab scholar Jahiz who began to classify animals and hinted at a theory of evolution. I went to London to see Jahiz’s book for myself. The Kitab al-Hayawan is a treatise on animals and the medical properties of the various parts of their bodies, compiled from works of Aristotle and Ibn Bakhtishu, the caption says. Inside, there is an illustration of a four-legged animal floating in a pool of water. It was probably intended to be a lizard or a salamander, but the image has echoes of Pakicetus, the land-loving ancestor of Diana. I looked down at the manuscript and it told me that the connections between us are not spurious or the result of coincidence, but ancient and profound, and yes — even the scientist in me will allow — sacred.

*

I have been putting up flyers. Bart, Jimmy and I are going to display Ambulocetus natans at the Natural History Museum next week. There will be a reception for the media, and my small world of palaeontologists will be watching with great interest. Diana is incomplete, but she is magnificent, and there is still much we can learn from her.

I have considered that there is a chance that all of this — Diana’s bones being sent to Cambridge, which made me put her back together, which put me at the intersection that day, which made me write it all down — was a ruse, a set of events puppeted by fate to send up a smoke signal to you, Elijah. All so that you would find the flyer tacked to a bulletin board on campus, come to my unveiling, read this story, and collude with me to determine its ending.

My hopes go up and down like paper lanterns in the wind. When I first sat down to write, I thought that if you ever read these words, you would see that although I gave you up, whatever it was that passed between us was no illusion, and here, in black and white, was the incontrovertible truth of it. And then, when I came here and started to piece Diana together, when I saw you on the street and then not again, I lost hope; I no longer imagined you running up beside me as I walked through the Quad, telling me that all was forgiven.

Worse, the more I wrote, the more I realised I couldn’t change a thing. I couldn’t sand down the rough edges of my words to you, nor make myself turn to look at you with your fingers wrapped around that bottle of honey, because that is how it happened and there is nothing I can do to push my hand back into the black of our past. I have been tempted to bend the truth, to paint myself a little prettier, but I know you hate evasion more than anything, so I have been relentlessly, brutally truthful. I have placed my ugly, complicated heart within these pages, and although the shame hasn’t passed, I tell myself at least I have been able to face it. I have been able to look that woman in the eyes, and say, yes, I was her. I was her and I am her. But this truth telling, in the end, is not for me but for you. To bring you back to me. To give you something in return for the pain that I threw at you like a shower of stones.

Now that I have pieced together not just the fossil but myself, I must tell you that this forensic approach no longer satisfies me, Elijah. It is no longer enough for me to uncover the truth. I want to make my tracks on the world, leave my own mysterious scratchings on the walls of history. As I put the finishing touches on Diana, placing her bones in their correct order, and as I finished our story, I asked myself what would happen if I cut my tether to the truth. What would happen if I turned to that place of dreams, the one where I can make up the ending of a story? I couldn’t do it with ours — I had to tell it exactly as it happened — but I could do it with others. I remembered my grandmother once telling me that her son had hidden a trunk full of rifles in her back garden during the war, and an idea began to take shape in my mind.

I am buoyed by the prospect of changing her story as I write, giving her a pause of happiness in what has been a long and lonely life. I can start with a true story and I can make the rest up, blunt the edges of a tragedy, or perhaps not that at all, perhaps render it even clearer, but this time, this time I will be holding the brush, I will be the storyteller, and everything — history, and the will of other people, and the hard forward thrust of time itself — will be in my thrall, because you see, Elijah, I am no longer a person written and mutely accepted, I am the scribe, the person with her foot on the brass pedal of the piano, and though you may never love me again, you will always remain the making of me.

I will send this to you now. I am full of those days on the beach when the light was the colour of oranges and the scent between us had mingled so deeply that there was nothing between us but a thin double-layer of skin. It is springtime in Cambridge; I see snow melting on sidewalks and blossoms punctuating the cold. In a few days I will wait for you to come and visit my beloved fossil. You will be late, I know. You will make me lose hope until the very last moment, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I will notice you tying your shoelace or taking something out of your pocket. The moment I see you I will feel myself disintegrating, but you will hold me steadily in your gaze, as you have always done. I have said a thousand sorrys within these pages, and I will say them again, later, but for now, there will be no more words, only eyes. Mine will say: you came back. And yours will say yes, I did, and we will walk hand in hand out of that room — past Diana and the glass flowers and Zamzam and Megna and the war my parents fought, all of our ghosts behind us, and before us the terrible, dark world — belonging only to each other.