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century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world. And she does not want to miss it—any of it.
What is the point in planting seeds? Why tend them? Why help them grow? Everything crumbles in the end. Everything dies. And she is all that’s left, a solitary ghost hosting a vigil for forgotten things.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.” And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”
“And how was it, your human love? Was it everything you dreamed of?” “No,” she says, and it is the truth. It was messy. It was hard. It was wonderful, and strange, and frightening, and fragile—so fragile it hurt—and it was worth every single moment.
Three hundred years she’s had to learn the color of his moods. She knows them all by now, the meaning of every shade, knows his temper, wants, and thoughts, just by studying those eyes. She marvels, that in the same amount of time, he never learned to read her own. Or perhaps he saw only what he expected: a woman’s anger, and her need, her fear and hope and lust, all the simpler, more transparent things. But he never learned to read her cunning, or her cleverness, never learned to read the nuances of her actions, the subtle rhythms of her speech.
