Epilogue
Grief was a strange thing in that it left no great hearth or perdurable keepsake, leaving only memories and blackened firewood, burned and wet and ruined, as proof there had been a disaster at all. A tragedy to explain the stabbing ache in the chest she had been so sure was empty. It was a strange feeling. Stranger even was the realisation that she could not grieve at all, for it had been nothing but the wisps of a desperate girl’s imagination. Nothing had truly been lost, for nothing had even been. Perhaps that was why her body was wracked with a dry hollowness rather than the wet tears which her mother had said characterised loss and mourning.
But it had all been so real, even when she tore artificial grass from the plastic floor by the fistful, and yanked the sun down to see it was but a bright yellow light bulb. Everything had felt so very real, and so Sua ignored the familiar knock at her door. Familiar, but not right. Never right, because nothing could be right ever again.
Yet the world had kept on turning, and people had kept on laughing, and time had kept on marching, and Sua could understand none of it. She couldn’t fathom how it was that the tapestry of reality could stay so stitched together, its intricate embroidery untouched and unaltered, when her world had come apart at the seams. It made no sense. Nothing did, anymore. But perhaps it did, and perhaps they only did not know because she had no corpse to present them with and gain their pause. Vaguely, Sua wondered if the world’s ignorance of her empty tragedy was some kind of karmic retribution for her unkind prison over the years.
Now, it hung rotting from her weak shoulders, no longer a barricade against warmth and light but a melted clay guardian which refused to move on. Almost like Sua herself.
There went that knock again. Sua didn’t respond. There would be no point anyway. The sun was not waiting for her on the other side of the door, and warmth would not embrace her when it crossed the threshold to this one. So she didn’t respond, continuing instead to stare blankly at her ceiling.
A sigh, faint and exasperated. Something thudded against the outside of the door—his foot, probably. “Are you dead?” When she didn’t respond, he tried again, angrier this time. More afraid. “I told you this would happen, I told you. And you went and did it anyway, and now what? You’re just going to waste away in your room, maybe kill yourself?” Silence. Something clinked against the door as it was set on the ground—a bowl, probably. “Stop being so cruel.”
For some reason, Sua thought she heard the panicked concern of a man who had already lost her once before, and was scared to again. Maybe he had, and she was the only one who forgot. Still, the guilt from that possibility did nothing to quash the mounting frustration in her chest. “Shut the fuck up about this ‘selfish’ and ‘cruel’ thing. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Ivan huffed, “Exactly. Because you’re selfish.”
“I said stop.”
“Actually it was me who said that, you said, and I quote, ‘Shut the fuck up.’” That his impression was near flawless only served to aggravate her further.
“Go away, Ivan. I don’t feel like fighting.”
A beat of silence, like he was stumped for words. Then, “Only if you tell me what happened.”
Sua wanted to cry. “Nothing happened.”
Slowly, the door creaked open. It hadn’t even been locked. She’d forgotten to do even that in her haze of grief. “It’s been three days, everyone is worried about you. Your friends even dropped off this soup.” When Sua reached out for it, glaring all the while, Ivan only tutted and held it higher, out of reach. As many things were. Warmth, for example. Love. Mizi. “Heart to heart first, reward second. Fair, isn’t it? I’m thinking of becoming a judge.”
She held her glare against his smiling, angry eyes. Or perhaps they were sad, and she simply did not know enough about her brother, did not know enough about his sin to truly know him. “It’s for me.”
“And it’s in my hand.”
Sua huffed and turned onto her side, away from him. The soup wasn’t worth it. He’d leave it by her bedside anyway, as he’d done yesterday and the day before. “You wouldn’t understand.” No one would. How could they, when Mizi had been known only to her?
In the next moment, cold chicken broth was washing over her miserable face. It drenched her silk pillow and the uniform she’d put on that morning, fully intending to leave for school but being stopped by the view of the sun, shining down shamelessly on her as if she hadn’t just lost her own.
“What the hell?” she all but shrieked, jolting up with a fierce glare. Ivan merely stared down with an unreadable expression. Then, a crooked smile worked its way onto his face, princely and roguish.
“I knew you wouldn’t take it, so I didn’t heat it up. Smart, right? Now tell me, or I’m going to start traumadumping on you instead. Pick your poison. Warning: oxyuranus microlepidotus has nothing on me, so I’d recommend the former.” Just as Sua opened her mouth to select the second option, Ivan continued again, “Also, for everything I tell you, you have to tell me something of equal import. Deal? Deal. Wow, so cooperative today, sister!”
Rapidly, she blinked, disbelieving and lost for words. Her brother only held up a peace sign in return. Finally, she sighed, swivelling her body over to face him. “Fine. You go first.”
“Hm. No.”
She grabbed a pillow. “Ivan.”
Then, he smiled again, and it met his eyes this time. “Ah, it’s because you’re so scary that I can’t confide in you, sister.” She raised the pillow higher. “Okay, okay! Hm…Where to start?” For a few moments, he was silent, eyes glazed over in thought, and Sua thought that some might think he was an oracle or shaman of some kind. He certainly looked the part. “Ah, okay. Got it,” he nodded, facing her eagerly. “I remember our past lives.”
A beat. Two beats. Ivan tried again, “You were terrible, you know. Sacrificing yourself on stage. You left poor Mizi all alone, even after lying and promising her that you’d find a way. Oh, you wouldn’t know her, well, she's…”
Ivan continued talking, but Sua could hear nothing but a strange ringing in her shocked ears, lips mouthing the other girl’s name. “You know Mizi?” she rasped, looking at him with wide eyes, mouth open and twitching erratically, unsure of what else to say.
Slowly, he trailed off, dark heterochromatic eyes lighting with surprise and recognition. “You know her. Then,” he inhaled deeply, meeting her gaze more seriously this time, “Do you know a boy named Till.” Sua blinked in confusion, not completely processing the question, too preoccupied with the idea that her brother knew Mizi, her Mizi. That she had known him back. Upon observing her almost catatonic demeanour, Ivan sighed, casting his eyes down at the ground, as if disappointed, before meeting her gaze again and snapping his fingers in front of her face until she again glared at him. “There, that’s more like it, sister! Haha, please put that pillow down. Now, where do you know Mizi from?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Sua muttered, turning her head to look at the wall. As if it were suddenly the most interesting thing in the world, and not completely bare of decoration on account of their parents insisting it was more sophisticated. “You’d just laugh.”
“I won’t,” he promised, and Sua physically felt herself falter at the gravity in his tone. “I just want to know.”
Sua loosed a breath, her enervated body wracking with the effort, shoulders hunching. “Promise?” she said, even knowing the answer.
“Promise.”
So she recounted all five visits; the hours she spent chasing Mizi through the grass like a child and learning her every character through a picnic, how she’d smelled a river of memories and seen their first home in them. At the fourth visit, she stuttered, the joy which had coloured her face vanishing almost instantly, as if erased by the world’s most potent solvent. On the fifth, she could only speak in ten second spurts each time, breath catching in her chest with every utterance of the other girl’s name. Both times, her brother, true to his word, had only nodded without even a quirk of the lip.
“And now it just feels so…ridiculous, because,” Sua paused, momentarily stumped as the words flew from her mind. As words did in grief, too afraid of the anguish to even attempt to express it. “She was just a dream.” Her chest ached. How could Mizi ever be ‘just’ a dream? Incomprehensible. “We never even met in real life.” But she had been so real, more real than anyone she’d ever known. “She didn’t even exist \.” Yet she had embraced her, touched her, all the same. “It’s different from when Sister died. We lost her, but Mizi— Nothing was lost. I’m mourning nothing.” And if her already fragmented chest—heart—shattered a little further at that verbal admission, that was something Ivan did not need to know.
Her brother merely shook his head. “First of all, she was certainly real.”
“Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now?” she argued.
He raised an unimpressed brow at her. “Need I remind you that I remember the entirety of my past life? I’d like to close this case here, baby sister.” Resisting the urge to strike him, she nodded in concession. “Great. Now, tell me what her last words were. Don’t give me that look—Mizi’s not the type to do all this and leave without a final message. Especially not if it’s you.” Something akin to sadness and jealousy and something more which Sua couldn’t read, not entirely, flashed over his features. Instinctually, she gulped, trepidation creeping into her veins. “She really did love you.”
Briefly, Sua wondered if he had somehow been privy to her dreams. He truly was far too knowledgeable for the mere three minute gap in their birth, but perhaps that was the weight of memories that weren’t and were his. “‘ Love well, my Sua .’”
A beat. Two beats. Then, “She’s worse than me in my past life. So cringey.”
“She was dying. And you still speak like a melodramatic period piece character.”
Ivan shrugged. “Well, I get a pass because I was always alone. Making fun of me would be akin to bullying, so hah.”
Here, Sua felt her face scrunch in a discomforted frustration. Weakly, so gently, she raised her fist to punch at his chest, casting her gaze again at the bare wall. “You’re not alone anymore. You should know that by now.”
And Sua couldn’t see it, but she was sure she could hear a smile in his voice. “Of course. My apologies.” Then, “So, you know what you have to do now, right? She was even worried enough to meet you in your dreams.”
Sua only huffed in reply.
🌙💭
It was only in the Winter of her final year of high school that Sua realised how beautiful the world was, and how warm the ice could be, and how embraced she had always been. Once, she would not have even been able to fathom such a notion, caught in her belief that she was to be forever caged away by damnation and sin. Doomed to spectate without even the company of the bonfire afforded to man by the grace of a god who was more human than she, and scorned her for her immoral insouciance. So, for seventeen years the world had been beautiful in the way that terrariums and snow globes and all manner of walled ornaments were; to her exclusion, a beauty she could not adequately appreciate if only for her inability to feel its blessing on her own guarded skin. Therefore it had been muted, covered with a thin plastic film which diluted the intensity of its beauty and stripped smaller things of it entirely. Like greetings on the way to class, or picnics by the riverbank.
But a year of sorrow and repetition of Her final words had filled the world with colour until the plastic was no more, and allowed her to see, finally, with a clarity she hadn’t even known herself to crave, the beauty of her world as it always had been. Now, staring at the once too-barren compartment before her, Sua wondered if her sister would have liked to have seen the world in the way Sua had been allowed to. If she would have liked it, vivacious vibrance against her muted monochrome. Sua supposed she wouldn’t, desperate as she was to maintain the visage of class. So, she probably would have disapproved of the colourful smattering of flowers set by her urn and her miserable portrait. They’d been left by her friends on their last visit, only yesterday, at their own insistence that ‘ this is what friends are for, Sua .’ Vaguely, she wondered if her sister would like them. Their mother certainly didn’t, and had voiced such—the most that she could without sacrificing her precious image. A model and a mother, equanimous and loving. Sua supposed she could allow her that much, since she had wanted nothing else Sua had offered her. She’d found her Mother’s Day flowers withered on the desk where she’d left them so many days prior, and her mother could only say that she did not like bright colours. They were unsightly.
Her sister would have likely echoed the same sentiment, having strived as she did to embody the mould their mother had made of herself, following every instruction meticulously, to the bone. Sua placed the flowers by her urn anyway. “I hope the afterlife is as gentle as a lover’s embrace,” she said, vaguely wondering if she and Ivan were beginning to morph into one, or if she had just stolen his melodrama, “And I hope you’re as happy as I’ve been.”
Then, she’d made the trip to the gentle creek in the small forest she’d located not six months prior, and sat by the tree she’d carved Her name into. A makeshift grave for someone whose body could not exist for burial, and yet had been the first to truly touch her anyway. A grave for her star, her god, her universe.
“Ivan’s been telling me more about you, you know. From what his past life saw.” Sua spoke quietly, as if afraid of outsiders listening in. Never mind that she was alone, with a scarcity of even animals or insects as company by the grave. “Apparently, we could never have proper picnics because they kept us on strict schedules, and you a diet. I guess that explains our picnic.” Here, a bird chirped, and Sua entertained herself with the delusion that Mizi had come back again before it flew away, swallowed by the glaring brightness of the sun, and Sua was once again left alone with a ghost not even of her world. She sighed, smiling to herself as she watched her reflection in the stream and imagined Mizi’s grinning face beside her. “Thank you,” she whispered, “For guiding me this time, and showing me again what love feels like. Rest well, my Mizi.”
And so the world kept on turning, and Sua turned with it, remembering the sun in every object its warmth touched.