Remember

In the grey twilight, I see a figure of ethereal beauty wandering beneath trees painted silver by starlight. Her steps are light, her movements imbued with the grace of a quiet ripple beneath water’s surface. Mist wraps her in a cloak woven of starlight. At her feet, a carpet of peach blossoms muffles the sound of her approach, their scent mingling with the cool air in a fragrant whisper of coming spring. Her presence seems to me a dream unlooked for.

Time makes fools of us all.

It tricks the heart, makes it believe it has healed, each year another shroud to cover the break. I have walked many moons, cradled in the soothing belief that her memory haunts me no longer.

Yet here she is, and the sight of her lays bare the deception of time, for I am returned at once to the moment of its breaking.

“Luna,” I whispered, the name catching in my throat. My mother named me Heath, for the shrubs that grew along the hills near our home, and the difference between her name and mine never failed to catch in irony.

The scent of peach blossoms rekindles memories long dimmed, paints them afresh until they are vibrant before me—days drenched in sunlight, walks together beneath these same trees, cream and peaches; first love, shy and flushed with tenderness, the timidity of a first kiss under falling petals.

They say there is no such thing as love at first sight, but they do not know what they speak of. For when first she crossed my sight, I felt a thing like electricity, and cliché though it may be, I loved her from the moment my eyes met hers.

The winds whisper tonight, carrying echoes from all who have been forgotten. I feel their hollow song in my bones—those who chose oblivion, those trapped behind prison walls, and those like Luna, who walked with eyes wide open to the ancient stones at the edge of the sea.

Perhaps that is why I returned to this grove after fifteen years of absence. The anniversary of our meeting pulls me back, though I promised myself I would never again walk among these trees that remember what she cannot.

Each year since she left, I’ve performed the same ritual. I take a peach blossom, preserved and dried from the season before, crush it between my fingers, and inhale its fading scent before releasing the fragments to the wind. It is my way of remembering what she chose to forget, my refusal to surrender what was taken from her.

Others have been lost to the walls at Oblivion’s Edge. I’ve watched them go, and I’ve seen the vacant peace in their eyes when they return, emptied of whatever pain drove them to seek such release. Some say the walls were built by the gods themselves as mercy for those whose memories became too heavy to bear. Some say the walls were built by the first people who wished to forget life’s pain. Stone by stone, they raised them from the seabed itself, imbuing each block with the ocean's power to wear away at memory’s sharp edges. Now they stand as both monument and mercy to those whose hearts prove too heavy to carry their recollections. Others claim they rose from the seabed, shaped by humanity’s unified desire to escape its own history.

That day, many years ago, I saw her on the shore of the sea. The heavens had already reclaimed every cloud after a storm. To my eyes, she seemed a young goddess of the ocean, rising from its depths, yet she carried an air of a peach bud not yet bloomed. When she spoke, her voice held both the crash of waves and the whisper of spring leaves. I, too, had only just ventured from my father’s home to make my way in the world. The divide between the untamed sea and the rootedness of the earth drew me to the seaside, yet it was she who captivated me, not the elements.

From the moment I saw her, I wished for us to intertwine and grow together, as two trees sharing a single root.

But I was still a sapling then—blind to other delights and allures the world had in store.

Perhaps that’s why, when she chose to forget, she turned to those ancient walls at the edge of the ocean, their stone worn smooth by centuries of waves.

I wonder now if the walls—and a hidden desire to erase the pain of my mother’s slow decline and death—were what called me to the shore when I first arrived. Though I was but a small child then, the scent of sickness in our small hut, the herbs that failed to heal her, and the damp earth that covered her body had seared themselves into my head.

But I never saw the walls. I only saw her.

We found our peace in Mistal’s Rest: the space between sea and shore. Luna taught me the language of water, how the river fed the peach trees and flowed into the ocean. If I had known how fragile such bridges could be, perhaps I would have treasured it more, held on more tightly.

Five years we shared. Five years of discovery and belonging. She spoke often of her family’s ways, how her mother had taught her to capture light itself in woven threads to create blankets that glowed with soft radiance in darkness. She said the ability to see the threads of light most eyes missed was a gift passed through her bloodline.

Her loom stood by our eastern window, its frame carved from driftwood she’d collected. I found her there most mornings, silhouetted against the sunrise, fingers dancing through invisible strands that somehow caught and held the dawn’s glow. The resulting fabric felt cool to the touch, but radiated gentle warmth when wrapped around the body.

“How is it done?” I asked once, watching her work.

She smiled with an enigma in the curve of her lips, one I wished to spend my lifetime unraveling. “There are threads that connect all things—light to darkness, memory to forgetting, love to loss. My people learned to see them, to work with them.”

I should have asked more questions, and recognized the rarity of the woman who shared my bed and life. Instead, I nodded and kissed her brow before leaving for another day of counting coins at the bank, tallying others’ wealth while overlooking my own.

The day she left, the night was devoid of stars, and when she said she could no longer bear to love me, the blackness seemed to stretch its fingers and wind around my heart.

“I will forget you and all that we shared,” she said, “for there are walls yet in this world granting this mercy.”

“To forget is too cowardly, even for you.” My voice was like steel, so she would not perceive the rawness beneath. Inside, I was splintering like ice on a spring lake, desperate to reach for her, beg forgiveness, and bargain with gods or devils if only she would stay.

She looked at me, and I found that her mind was a labyrinth of doors closed to me, and I could no longer read the riddles of her heart. “Better to be cowardly than live with the torment you have wrought upon me.”

A drunken night, a single mistake.

The bridge we wrought had started to rot from within. My time at the bank took me away for long hours and wearied me, so my temper ran short, while she spent her days threading starlight into blankets for travelers passing through.

On the worst nights, when we flung words like stones at one another, I would find her afterward silent at her loom, weaving patterns I couldn’t decipher. I know now they were goodbyes, each completed blanket a fragment of herself she was already preparing to surrender.

During our quarrels, she would stare out at the river, as though already planning her escape. The starlight in her blankets grew dimmer with each passing day, while my ledgers at the bank grew heavier with the weight of ordinary concerns.

Each day, the distance between us grew like the space between shore and horizon. I found myself searching her face for traces of the girl who had once taught me the language of water, but she seemed to ebb away with each tide.

“What is happening to us, Heath?” she asked once, after we’d flung words like barbs to wound one another.

I had no answer, only a feeling of the growing divide.

The tavern stood inland from the sea where we settled. It was a place where merchants and sailors mingled with those who had never known salt air. Perhaps I went there after another fight to seek something of her essence in the marriage of earth and ocean. I listened to stories about the captain who had caught a message in a bottle from a fairy living on an island, now long submerged beneath the waters, and sailed to create a new home with her. They became the first to meld together those of land and sea. It was an old, beloved myth in those parts.

Folks in those parts traded these ancient tales as if they were valuables. They were as eager to tell and listen as any small child evading bedtime.

The wine tasted of storm surge, and after so many cups, I forgot that Luna and I had intertwined our hearts as one. She faded from my mind altogether. When the merchant’s daughter pressed her lips to mine, they carried none of the salty-sweet taste I had grown to love, yet still I did not pull away.

The girl, Briar, had watched me for months. She confessed as much as her fingers traced the buttons of my shirt. She had seen how Luna and I were drifting apart, like ships cut from their moorings. “A man like you needs solid ground,” she whispered, “not sea foam and starlight.”

For one night, I surrendered what was familiar, to warmth without mystery, to earth without ocean. I told myself it meant nothing. It was just a momentary weakness, a stumble that need not define our path.

But when I returned home at dawn, Luna was waiting, her eyes reflecting the dying stars.

“Don’t,” she said when I opened my mouth to speak. “I can still smell her on you.”

I tried anyway. “It meant nothing.”

“Nothing means nothing,” she replied, her voice flat. “Every action ripples outward, changing everything it touches.”

When Luna learned I’d slept with a “tavern wench,” she answered my unspoken incredulity with coldness. “Removal of inhibitions only revealed what already lay in your heart. Alas, that it was not me.”

I let her go then, fists clenched as heat coursed through me, whether from anger or shame, I would not name. After she left, I never thought to cross her path again.

And though the pain of her loss left me aching for a past I could never regain, I would not pay the price of erasing my memory of her. She must remain, for the love I still endured.

It was Briar who told me where Luna had gone.

“I saw her walking to the walls,” she said when she found me drinking alone in the tavern, three nights after Luna left. “I’m sorry, Heath.”

The words fell hollow. Sorry for what? For the night we shared? For telling me where Luna had gone? For the fact that she’d gone at all? All seemed meaningless given the void opening inside me—the knowledge that, soon, Luna would look upon my face and see a stranger.

“Why are you here?” I asked, not looking at her.

“Because I know what it is to be forgotten,” she answered softly.

I looked at her then, seeing for the first time the sadness beneath her easy smile. “Your father?”

“Went to the walls last spring, after my mother died. He comes to the shop across the road each week to trade and doesn’t know his own daughter.” She sat beside me but not touching. “I go there to see him, and drink and sleep with other men to forget.”

The morning after Luna walked to the walls, I went to our cottage by the peach grove. Her loom stood silent by the window, a half-finished blanket still stretched across its frame. I touched it, expecting the familiar glow of her work, but my fingers met only ordinary wool, dull and colorless.

The magic had already begun to fade from her creations, just as I would fade from her mind.

I removed the unfinished piece from the loom with care, folded it, and put it away, then carried the frame down to the shore. With each step, memories lashed at me: Luna teaching me to swim, Luna collecting driftwood, Luna laughing as waves chased our footprints from the sand.

At the water’s edge, I set the loom adrift, watching as the current carried it out toward the distant walls. Perhaps it was foolish sentiment, but it seemed wrong to keep the instrument of her gift when she had surrendered it.

Now, she stands before me once more, and I cannot but recall our last meeting so long ago. She speaks, asks me if she is intruding, and the rhythm of her voice is a familiar melody to my ears. Even fifteen years could not erase the memory of her voice and how it stirred my heart.

“Forgive me,” she says, when I do not answer. “I saw the river from a distance, and it seemed to call to me from afar. If I have erred, then I will depart and will not trouble you.”

I shake my head. “Do you not know?” My question hides the hidden plea.

Something ripples across her features. She looks into the distance, and a sadness veils her pale eyes. “I think I do, and then I do not.”

Words thicken on my tongue, and now it is I who is the coward. I fear a renewal of her condemnation, yet her eyes show no recognition of me or this space where we shared such tender moments.

When I can no longer bear the silence, I reach to take her hand as I did long ago, but she draws back as she did then. “Sir, you forget yourself.”

And thus, the riddle unravels. She has forgotten, while I live on, remembering. All this time, I had hoped it was not true, that she did not go after all. Alas, that Briar spoke true.

Grief makes fools of us all.

Beneath the moonlight, I care not for the things we said before we parted, or our reasons that we could not be together. I know only that, for her, our love does not exist, while I must wear away my sorrow in a world where she knows me no longer.

Once, I knew what it was to love another; later did I know what it is to lose. Only now do I know what it is to carry alone the memories of two.

Yet memory is not what the heart desires. How can love remain when memory is lost?

Shaking my head, I say at last, “Perhaps you came once to this place in a dream. Night shifts the thoughts of our hearts, and though you know it not, there is some truth in the unspoken words of our fancies.”

She smiles, and it seems to me her smile is both relieved and sad. And I think that somewhere, she knows something of what she has lost. “Yes, perhaps that is so.”

She turns to leave. I wish I could speak, but even if I could grasp the words wrung from my heart, I have no power to turn back the tide.

Nevertheless, a single word tumbles from my mouth even as I bite my lip to tuck it away.

“Wait.” Please. My heart wrestles with that one from breaking into existence.

“Yes?”

Did I hear the smallest catch in her voice as she answered me?

“It is perhaps not my place to ask, but you move me, though I cannot tell why. Please tell me, are you happy?” Maybe, I think, if she found peace in oblivion, then it is better this way. I will bear the burden that she could not, for to me, though remembrance brings pain, forgetting is inconceivable.

She does not turn back, but her steps falter in seeming reluctance to depart. Silence deepens. Clouds pass over the moon, veiling us in partial shadow.

“I cannot say,” she says at last.

A hand tightens its grip on my chest. I bend down to grasp a cluster of pink petals. Overstepping the bounds of propriety, I reach for her hand before she can pull away and press the petals into her palm.

“For remembrance,” I murmur.

Both of us fix our eyes upon the small tokens of a past romance. Her hand twitches, and I think she will let the petals fall. Instead, she closes her fingers over them.

“Thank you.”

A taste of sweetness intertwines with my lingering regret at her words. I watch her glide across the river, leaving me in silent vigil under the stars. I think of others who may have been forgotten from within those prison walls; those who once loved them, left behind, carry twice the weight of memory. Perhaps none of them have ever woven starlight into cloth, though, and I wonder where those quilts are now. If they still shine for those they cover at night.

Perhaps some memories are too bright to fully fade. Like starlight caught in cloth, they endure even as waves wear everything else smooth in the end.

I let her go one last time.