“Are you truly certain? You wish to leave Valinor, the home of our kin, and our creators? And you do not even seek to return to Middle-Earth, but will instead travel to the lands beyond?”
She does not ever speak without being certain of what she means. Her husband knows this. His words are in themselves a final choice, the last chance to remain as she is.
“I have lived, and endured. Now I will walk a new path. Do not grieve for me. We have been Galadriel and Celeborn since the First Age of Middle-Earth. You are content to remain Celeborn still, and so I can offer nothing save my farewell, and goodwill.”
He kisses her forehead, less intimately than a husband would. They are strangers now, and yet he feels no anger in his heart.
“May you find the fulfillment you seek.”
Several decades into the future, Carol wakes from a dream.
The dream, which was about two elves making a choice, sparks a memory. And another. And another. An array of memories, and Carol closes her eyes. She doesn’t fall back asleep.
Therese sleeps beside her. Carol thinks, my love. There is so much you don’t know about me.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Carol says, the next day. She and Therese are curled into each other on the sofa, like nothing so much as…
two trees, grown so close together that their leaves kiss in the wind, bark pressed against bark like hands on skin, safe in the heart of Lórien forest.
Carol rethinks this plan.
Carol rethinks rethinking the plan. Not that there is a plan; quite the opposite. Just a feeling, the sense that all lies must end, all secrets must emerge.
It’s been such a long, difficult road up to this point, where she and Therese wake up together every morning, where Rindy is allowed to visit on weekends and holidays, where Carol can be the woman she is, the woman she wants to be.
Except she was once a very different sort of woman. Really not a woman at all, but another being altogether. She has never said this to anyone. She had never thought it would go over well with Harge. Probably his first response would have been,“Honey…. What sort of inane books have you been reading lately? And I’ve never known you to get this tipsy.”
Abby, as close as she and Carol are, would have likely responded with gentle concern and recommendations of a good psychoanalyst.
“What is it?” Therese asks her, trusting and warm, with the barest hint of trepidation.
This is Therese. Loyal, accepting, goddamn wonderful Therese. Which, really, is why Carol is planning on breaking a lifetime’s worth of silence. She wants their life together to be open, no hidden things standing between them. After the PI, the letter, the months of no communication, she owes Therese that much.
“What I am about to say will sound...honestly, it will be pretty unbelievable.” Carol keeps Therese in her gaze. “But I need you to believe it. I need you to understand.”
“Of course I will.” Now Therese is worried. She sits up, unconsciously making herself taller, more ready to accept bad news. Carol likes watching Therese’s strength emerge in instances such as these, but she still hastens to reassure her (lover? Spouse, despite the absence of legal formalities? Love?) dearest.
“Nothing’s wrong, darling. It’s about my past. Some things...that I haven’t told you before. I haven’t told these things to anyone, certainly not anyone else I’ve loved.”
“Whatever you’ve done, or whatever happened,” Therese says, with conviction, “I don’t care. If it was bad, it doesn’t make a difference.”
Carol smiles widely, and truly, as she always does when Therese talks like this. “Thank you. But, it isn’t anything I’ve done, or an event that happened. It’s who I was, before I was born on this earth.”
Therese frowns. “Before...you were born? How could it be about before you were alive?”
Carol touches Therese’s hand. “Let me be clear: before my life as Carol, I lived another life.” She recalls now, with some nostalgia, the woods that were her home, the impossible vitality that coursed through her. Other races had seemed to her as birds, never still nor quiet. She’s one of them now, the birds. Rattling through space and time.
She does not regret.
“Other lands exist, Therese. I’m not talking about heaven, or god help me, hell. I’m talking about lands apart, full of fantastic creatures. Mankind, of course, but also dwarves, goblins, talking beasts, and,” here it comes, “elves.
“My first name, though I wouldn’t say it’s my true name ” (not with all she has gained as Carol) “ was Galadriel. I was one of those elves. Immortal, wise, or so I thought, and removed from human affairs.”
Therese’s eyes bug out.
Her mouth falls open.
Something unintelligible but nevertheless quite capable of conveying astonishment comes out of her mouth.
“I,” she finally says, “I, um. I don’t know…”
“It’s okay. It’s a lot. I’ll give you a moment.”
She gives Therese a moment, during which they stare at each other. Therese, fortunately, does not project anything like horror at having been sharing a bed with a madwoman, but neither does she seem to get what Carol is speaking of. Which is about what Carol expected, and frankly she considers Therese’s reaction to be incredibly reasonable.
Carol is trying to be fair about this. She considers herself to be a fair person. About three full minutes to mull Carol’s tale over, that’s fair, isn’t it?
It is an awkward three minutes.
Carol clears her throat several times. She wonders what Rindy is doing right now. She pictures Abby entering the room and sniggering at the sight of them. Carol actually wishes that this would happen, if only to release the tension.
When the moment has passed, Therese speaks again. Carol breathes out, the sound over-loud due to that air being mostly trapped inside her lungs for the past few minutes.
“And this isn’t, a...story, or metaphor, or...no. No, I can see that you’re serious.”
“I am.” Carol promises. “I just want you to know me. It’s only right. If I’m to expect you to share yourself with me, then I should...I should be honest in return.”
Also, if she’s being truthful with herself, even, Carol has been feeling Galadriel more and more lately. It’s because she’s so happy. Over the past few years, the adjustment to being a mother, again after all these years (her first daughter is well into her thousands by now), the pain and exhaustion as her marriage ended, the fear and hope that came with falling for Therese, have all kept her strictly human. Confused, out-of-control, the years fluttering by so quickly, these are not the traits of Galadriel.
“How? If you’re, a, a fairy-tale creature ”
“Was,” Carol clarifies, “I can assure you, I’m human now.”
“If you were a fairy-tale creature, how are you here with me?”
Her face is baffled, and more than a little bit seems to be saying, “What the hell, Carol?” But she isn’t wary. Nor does she insist that Carol is playing a prank on her, or that Carol is actually a hallucinatory liar who just happened to have an extremely attractive ass, and really the ass isn’t worth the hallucinations and/or lies, so Therese is just going to leave before this all becomes too bizarre to handle. Therese says none of these things.
Carol has learned to take her victories where she can get them.
She refrains from all exterior expressions of triumph, and instead settles on a look of quiet affection and sympathy. She decides that it makes her appear dignified.
Another difference from when she was Galadriel: Galadriel never had to try to look dignified.
Therese breathes in, then out. “Tell me more,” she says finally. “If I’m supposed to understand, I need to know more.”
“Of course,” Carol responds quickly. “Of course, I’ll tell you everything. It’s a long tale, and it begins many generations ago.” She pauses, then adds, “I’m afraid I haven’t been honest about my age.”
“What? How old are you?”
Carol tells her.
After which Therese is incapable of doing anything but staring, and also she seems to lose control of her jaw, which hangs open in the manner of a cartoon character on television.
“Ten thousand,” she mumbles finally.
“I ”
“Ten thousand!”
“Yes…”
“Over ten thousand years old?!!”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how those years count, now that I’m human. They feel so distant, like another reality entirely. Really, I might as well be counting only the human years.”
“I’m with a ten thousand-year-old woman,” Therese chokes out faintly. Carol decides that it would be better not to correct her, though technically it’s ten thousand and eighty-four. And a half.
“How are you...why would I even interest you? Why would Harge?”
Carol winces at the mention of Harge. Not one of her finest decisions, but she was unpracticed when it came to human men. She’d forgotten that human personalities shift and change as time passes, and that two opposing personalities can bring out some truly unpleasant traits in each other.
It’s not that she blames herself for Harge. That would be unreasonable.
But. She does wish that ten thousand years, give or take, had remained lodged in her mind, instead of drifting, like a dream, like a person you cared about once but lost touch with long ago. Perhaps if she’d retained more of Galadriel, been less Carol, she would have been wiser.
Then again, Rindy happened. This is worth all the blunders that Galadriel wouldn’t have made.
“I...was young. Ancient, by all standards, but I’d only had a few years as a mortal woman to prepare me. When I made the choice, to forsake my immortality, my husband ”
“You had a husband?”
Carol can’t help but smile, wistfully, at the distant memory of Celeborn. “Yes. I had an elven husband, and a daughter. Grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who were half-Men and half-Elf, and who came to rule in one kingdom or two. I wish you could have met me in my first youth. I was proud, sure of myself, headstrong.”
Therese nods. The disbelief is still there, but it’s beginning to fade. Though she did flinch when Carol mentioned grandchildren.
Age twenty-five, and a step-grandmother. I’m so sorry, Therese.
“I grew old, though my skin never wrinkled, and my hair never became gray. That’s the one thing I do miss: never having to worry about powders or dye.” Neither of them chuckles, but Therese loosens up, a little.
“But, you had a childhood here, on earth. You and Abby, you grew up together.”
I came from the same earth, Carol can’t help thinking, but the region of Middle-Earth is far from here, and none of the dwarves or the hobbits are eager to migrate. “I didn’t just give up my immortality. I turned back the clock for myself. I made up my mind that I would have a full life as a human, rather than a few short years before old age.
Carol stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was far away, as if lost in bygone emotions. “I was so weary of the company of elves. Do you know what it’s like, waiting for the end of the world?”
“It sounds hopeless.”
“If you live in paradise, which we called Valinor, and you aren’t going to die, there is no need for hope. I suppose I got bored. How terrible is that, getting bored with paradise?”
Therese honestly considers it, which makes Carol love her all the more. “It’s not terrible.” Carol raises an eyebrow, and Therese adds, “though it is pretty entitled.”
She puts on an over-the-top and somewhat insulting British accent. “Poor, rich, woman! Ah, my dear, I just have so much, how dreadful it all is.”
They both laugh. Carol moans, “Oh dear, it’s true. It’s too true,” and Therese tosses a pillow at her. The result of all of this is the two of them chortling like a pair of children.
“See,” Carol says finally. “I hadn’t laughed like this, in too long a time. What’s immortality if you don’t have that?”
There was more to it. There always is.
As she watches the two hobbits, clinging to each other, always clinging, something occurs to her. They are both very old, and unlike all else in the Undying Lands, they are nearing their end. That’s why they hold on to each other. What is she, Galadriel, holding on to? What reason would she have to cling to anything, to care about something or someone that much?
And she thinks, it would be nice, to find out for herself how it feels.
“So you, what, became a little girl? A human girl?”
“No,” Carol replies with great dignity. “I became a teenager. Around age... fourteen, or fifteen? I didn’t want to go through childhood again. A child needs someone to care for her...of course, I didn’t consider that I would be arrested as soon as I arrived in New York, and declared a ward of the state.”
Therese puts a hand over her mouth. “I didn’t…”
“I don’t tell many people. I was adopted quickly enough, by a wealthy family who’d never wanted a little girl, but for some reason thought a teenager would be a good addition to the household. Ten thousand and sixty-two years old, and suddenly I had scheduled bedtimes. You can’t even imagine.”
Therese giggles helplessly. “Oh, God. I can’t. So that’s when you met Abby?”
“That’s when I met Abby. And as much as I grew to love her, I never told her any of this.”
“I’m just special, aren’t I?” Though the words are said with some irony, Carol’s response is utterly sincere.
“You are.”
They are quiet.
“How did you do it?” Therese murmurs.
“I was something of an enchantress. Before you say anything, no, it was different from being a witch. No broomsticks, or cats were involved, I promise you. But it wasn’t as hard as you’d think, though I don’t believe I could ever repeat that spell. I don’t have the power, not anymore.”
“Do you have...any magic left? Anything you could show me?”
Carol has prepared for this. She’s glad, however, that she didn’t need to use any otherworldly means to prove her story to Therese. It feels good, for someone to have faith in just her words. It feels like gratitude, and sunlight.
“I didn’t used to call it magic. We, the elves, barely knew the word. For us, it was natural. Yes, dearest, I can show you.”
Carol takes Therese’s hands, massaging the palms, interlocking fingers. She concentrates hard. She practiced this last night, while Therese slept on, practiced until her mind was wrung out and she fell into an exhausted slumber. It’s not anywhere near what she could have done as Galadriel, but it should be enough.
She commences chanting, softly, in Elvish. Really, it’s more like singing. Therese, alae! Tolo ar nin.
The room around them appears to shiver. The furniture blurs. The colors lighten into transparency and are gone. Reality shifts sideways.
Therese and Carol are sitting in a grove of trees. Each tree is large and majestic, is bursting with tree-dynamism. The forest is nakedly visible before them. More so, Carol can smell the damp earth and the elanor flowers. It would seem as if they were actually in Lothlórien, except for the historical sense of the place. It has the feel of an echo, a time done with and put away. It is not of the now that Carol and Therese inhabit.
“Oh,” Therese whispers.
“This was my kingdom,” Carol says.
“You left this?”
“No, my dear. And yes. I left Valinor, the Undying Lands across the sea, for a mortal life. Before that, I left this forest, Lothlórien, for the Undying Lands. A great Enemy had been defeated, and after this struggle, it was time for the race of Men to inherit Middle Earth. The elves, myself included, decided to leave them to it.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Is it? I didn’t see it that way, then.” It had been an ending meant to engender a beginning. A rebirth similar to my own. Everything comes full circle, Therese.
Therese stands and turns slowly, taking in each and every aspect of Lórien. She is careful to keep holding Carol’s hands; therefore, Carol gets pulled along. She turns with Therese, feeling a little like she’s on a carousel or playing a game with Rindy.
Rindy: will Carol ever tell her daughter about any of this? She might. Rindy is, to the best of Carol’s knowledge, utterly and perfectly human. There’s no benefit to telling her, except that Carol’s on a new streak of being honest to those she loves. She’d like to continue on that path.
The forest is magnificent, and beautiful, and forgiving. Most of all, forgiving. Carol longs for it, just a little, but like Galadriel, she doesn’t go back on her choices.
She knows that if she stays here, she might see Celeborn, or the Nine of the Fellowship, or herself. No part of Carol would be satisfied with the mere echoes of those she knew once.
She doesn’t particularly desire to see herself.
It’s better if she just returns to her life. With Therese. With her mortal friends and her mortal daughter.
“Therese.”
Therese catches her gaze. They exchange something: a thread of connection, the unfurling of secret things, the awe of the one and the reminiscence of the other. “We’re leaving already?”
“We’re not truly here,” Carol points out. “This isn’t me, anymore, but can you fathom it now, my love? Everything I told you?”
“Yes,” Therese breathes. “Easily. Oh, Carol. I don’t know if I could ever go away from this place, if I lived here, but I’m so happy that you did.”
With a complicated eleven phrase, hymn-like in its utterance, and much focus, Carol dispels the illusion.
Therese glances around, and Carol worries at the faint disappointment in Therese’s face at their ordinary house. Then Therese looks at Carol, and the worry goes away. So does any trace of disappointment in Therese.
“Will you tell me more? I want to understand everything about you.”
“Of course. Of course.” She steps forward and wraps Therese in her arms. They kiss once, and it is not long, but it is fierce and lingering. It encompasses everything they feel and have felt and will feel.
Therese puts her head against Carol’s shoulder, and mumbles,
“My girlfriend was once an immortal...elf...magician. Nobody will ever be able to out-boast me.”
“Don’t start,” Carol warns her.
“I won’t,” Therese promises. To prove her sincerity, she places a hand on Carol’s reincarnated heart.