A Brightness Long Ago

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Sauradia, her joy for this morning. There is so much joy in her just then, a hard, bright rush of it. It is not a feeling she knows intimately, but it is there to be found, if life allows.

You can do impulsive, reckless things completely sober.

We want to sink into the tale, leave our own lives behind, find lives to encounter, even to enter for a time. We can resist being reminded of the artificer, the craft. We want to be immersed, lost, not remember what it is we are doing, having done to us, as we turn pages, look at a painting, hear a song, watch a dance. Still, that is what is being done to us. It is. Even so . . . we do turn the page, and can be lost again. And in that deep engagement we may find ourselves, or be changed, because the stories we are told become so much of what we are, how we understand our own days.

Holding great power can cause people, men and women both, to behave in ways most of us would never consider.

The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing. We can want things so much sometimes. It is the way we are.

She did not live her life to be a memory for me, or anyone, but she is. Some people mark you as they go by.

truth and memory do not easily dance together,

We are always the person we were, and we grow into someone very different, if we live long enough. Both things are true.

I knew, once, a woman diamond bright, and two men I will not forget. I played a part in a story in a fierce, wild, windblown time. I do have that. I always will. I am here and it is mine, for as near to always as we are allowed.