A Memory Not For You

Kidnapped. I’d been kidnapped, by a... a... spirit, apparently. That’s what she called herself at any rate. Well, she called herself Ada, too. I had no memories, either. I couldn’t recall a thing before a few weeks ago, but she’d told me that she had kidnapped me. She’d told me that she didn’t want to lie to me.

I was a... human. A human girl. Named Helene, according to Ada. I didn’t know what either of those words meant, human or girl, when I thought about it. None of my words, really. I could speak them, but if I really thought about it, there was no further meaning. A human was what I was, and that was a thing different from a spirit in some way. A girl was what I was, and was that different from Ada? I would have to ask when she came back.

She was somewhere else right now. She went somewhere far away, every now and then; where I came from, perhaps. Where she kidnapped me from. I sat and waited.

There wasn’t much else to do, here. There was the cottage, and outside of it an endless field of pink, red, and white peonies. That such a thing could exist was a little difficult for me to comprehend, but I could seemingly walk as much as I wanted, and if I ever turned around, I would eventually wind up back at the cottage. I didn’t know what else it could be like though. Maybe the place I came from was different. I was curious about it, naturally. But in some respect, I didn’t mind being kidnapped so much. I supposed it was because I knew nothing else. It didn’t hurt either that I found Ada... q... quite pretty. Though, there was just so much that I didn’t know, so much out there that could exist.

Other fields like this one, other humans, other spirits, other kinds of things like humans and spirits that were somethings else entirely... I was sure there were things out there too that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Part of me wanted to try to escape. Most of me didn’t. Ada was all I had in this place, though I had only known her for a short time. I didn’t want to be rude to her. I was awkward enough as it was.

There was a knock on the door, which startled me, and I fell off of my chair.

“Helene, I’m back!” Ada yelled, opening the door.

“Welcome back Ada,” I replied, scrambling up to my feet. Shelooked at me with a little smile formed at the edges of her lips, but didn’t comment on how quick to startle I was.

“How... how was it?” I avoided asking about any specifics. We both knew she wouldn’t talk about that.

“It was alright!” She smiled at me. She was always very positive like that. It made it hard to be scared of her, though part of me was, ever so slightly.

Silence lingered for a moment. I didn’t ever know what to say.

“So... would you fancy playing a board game?”

“Sure,” I responded. The only board games we had were ones that Ada had made. She could make things physically appear, though it took effort for her. Most of what we did was playing board games. Sometimes we went on walks together too, through the flowers. That was nice. I enjoyed talking with her a lot too.

“Can we do the one with the sticks and crosses?” I asked.

“Sure!” Ada responded, pulling it out from the shelf where she kept the board games. “Do you wanna be sticks, or crosses?” Playing as crosses was easier. I guessed it wasn’t particularly easy to make a game perfectly fair.

“I’ll play sticks,” I said.

“You sure?” Ada asked. Maybe, I thought, she chose to make it unbalanced. Or at least let it be. She did always let me pick.

“Yep.”

We played for a bit, and she won pretty easily.

“So whaddya wanna do now?” she asked, as we finished putting it away. I paused for a second to think.

“Could we go for a walk?” The sun was going to set soon, and I liked walking with Ada when that happened. It was pretty.

“Sure,” she said, smiling. She probably knew that was why I wanted to.

She opened the door for me, holding it behind her.

I walked quickly, so as not to keep her waiting. We walked together for a few moments, and I let her lead me. Eventually, I worked up the courage to say what I had been meaning to for a while.

“Hey, Ada?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we... talk?”

“Yeah!” she replied. I had almost expected her to respond by bantering that we were talking right now; not in a mean way, but just in the floaty and cheery way she almost always talked— though I had said it anyways, since I didn’t know how else to broach the matter. In light of that, I appreciated her actual response all the more, although it didn’t matter particularly much.

“Can we talk about… everything? Like how you…” I paused on the word ‘kidnapped.’ She had used it herself, so I supposed it was acceptable for describing what she had done to me. I continued. “... kidnapped me.”

“Yes,” she said, “we can talk about that at any time. We can talk about anything you want at any time, though there are some things I am obligated not to say.” She sat down, turning towards me. I sensed the slightest hint of both an extreme kindness and a kind of weariness within her eyes all at once. I sat down across from her, carefully pushing some peony stems out of my way.

“Then... could you tell me everything up to the edge of what you are obligated not to say?”

“I wish I could tell you anything you would ever want to know, Helene. So of course,” she said, smiling warmly, and then adding, “To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised that you didn’t ask me sooner. I was considering bringing it up myself, though I was considering if there was a reason you might not want to, since you hadn’t yet.”

“I thought you might think it rude.”

“Well, you haven’t been rude to me at all in these past few weeks. And, I’d tolerate a great deal of rudeness from you; if it was intolerable though, I’d say something, and I wouldn’t hold anything against you for anything before that. So please, don’t let that concern you,” she said, smiling. “Anyways,” she quickly continued, “you wanted to know what I could tell you. Hmm…”

She thought for a moment, and then said, “Well, I don’t exactly know where the border is, between what I can tell you and what I can’t. I can tell you that I’ve only had good intentions, at least in my view, and I’ve only been trying to do what you want. Though I know that doesn’t make sense, and I can’t explain that further. I can also tell you that if I tell you too much, something bad will happen to me. And then I won’t be able to do something for you that I want to do. I don’t know if there’s really any more that I can tell you. What determines what I can’t tell you is something I definitely can’t tell you.”

“Hmm… That’s kind of difficult to think about. Well, I have all the time I could ever want, I suppose.” I laid back, looking up at the sunset and the peonies and the clouds. “In the meantime, this is… beautiful.” I heard the leaves rustle softly as Ada moved up, and quietly slid herself to laying up by my side, watching the sunset as well. My heart beat a little faster. This was nice. Really nice, in a way that felt… healing. Though I didn’t know what I would need healing from.

We stayed like that for a while, watching the sun set as the peonies rustled with the wind. Then Ada broke the silence.

“Hey Helene?”

“Yeah, Ada?”

“I’m sorry. For not being able to tell you so much, for it being so complicated, for everything. I realize for you, you have no way of knowing if I’m even being honest about anything, since I won’t let you leave. Well, not that I won’t. If you really wanted to, we could talk about it sometime.” She paused, letting silence take the place of her words for a brief moment, and then started again. “But my point is, for all you know, I could have trapped you here out of some obsession for you, and erased your memory to try to cater my behavior to manipulating you. It could have been countless times even, that I erased your memory, since you wouldn’t have remembered. Or whenever you wanted to leave, as you thought we were going to talk about it. I— I wouldn’t do that to you, you have to trust me— well, you don’t, but that would be truly horrific.”

“If you’re being honest, which I think you are, then you don’t need to apologize, and I appreciate it, Ada. I’ll be honest… sometimes it does scare me a bit, considering the possibility that something like that could be true. I don’t know what to think, really. It’s a lot.”

“Yeah.” A few moments passed.

“Actually, I thought of something even worse. I could think that I’m not doing that, having manipulated my own memories so that I could do so more efficiently. I hope I’m not doing that.” She added, after a few seconds, “It’s a lot for me to think about, too.”

We stayed silent for a while after that. After the sun fully set, Ada asked me if I wanted to go back for dinner. I said yeah, and we started walking back.

“Hey Ada?”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“This might be stupid of me if I think about it, but I’m gonna try to be more honest with you. About stuff like sometimes being scared of you.”

“Alright, if that’s what you want to do,” she said, giving me a soft smile. She was only barely lit by the glow of the lanterns from the cabin, which we were slowly approaching.

“I have something else I want to be honest about too.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

“I’ll… tell you tomorrow. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Alright,” she said softly.

When we got back, Ada opened the door for me and we went inside. When she came back from wherever she went, it’d usually be harder for her to conjure up objects like food, so there was an icebox with ingredients and pre-made meals. The ice never melted, which was a thing that Ada told me ice usually did.

I went over to the kitchen and waited for her. I always helped Ada cook when she did. I absolutely didn’t want to let her cook on her own for us, even though she was much better at it than I. Plus it was just something else to do, and I liked getting better at cooking.

“Oh, no, I don’t need to cook manually tonight, actually,” Ada said.

“Oh.” I walked back into the dining area.

“What would you like?” she asked.

“Mm… you pick,” I said. She knew of a lot more kinds of food than me, naturally; all I really knew was from her or this world, though I did have the words for some dishes.

“Alright, well this is called— well actually, I’m not sure if that’s a thing I can tell you.” She thought for a second. “No, that should be fine— so this is pizza, and I like it with mushrooms and olives on it.” She raised her hands, and a disk started forming from nothing in the air. “Oh, could you get out one of the metal trays, some plates for us and a chef’s knife?”

“Yep!”

“Thanks,” she said, the pizza still forming. I fetched the metal tray, plates and knife from the pantry, and by the time I had returned, it was fully done.

“Oh wait, should I not have gotten out utensils?” I asked, setting down the tray and plates.

She smiled warmly. “Nope! You usually eat pizza with your hands.”

“Hm, I see,” I said.

She then took up the knife from me and set about cutting it into triangular shapes. She plated a cut on each of our plates.

“Thanks.” She smiled at me.

I watched her to see how she would eat the pizza. She laughed a little, noticing. “Here, you eat it like this.” She showed me how to hold it, and started eating her piece. I started eating too. I considered it as I ate.

“How is it?”

“It’s… good. I really like this.”

“I’m glad!” she said.

We talked more as we ate. Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask Ada a question.

“Hey Ada, what do you think about love?”

“Love?”

“Yeah.”

The only people I knew were her and I, so I didn’t really have the capacity to think of the concept in any abstract way. I could try to think of abstractions, but at the end of the day, they were only mental modifications of an idea of love between us. I knew she probably knew that, too. Though she might think of it in terms of her more general understanding of it.

“Hmm… I think it’s a wonderful thing.”

Hearing her answer, I needed to know what question she was answering. Even though it would be making it explicit, I needed to clarify.

“Do you mean love generally? Or the only understanding of love that I have?”

“Both, if I’m understanding your question right. And if I understand your understanding of love.” She let silence hang in the air for a moment, and then added, smiling a bit, “I think I might have an idea of what you wanted to tell me tomorrow; if it’s what I think, then… it’s not just you.”

I’d only just noticed, but my heart was beating like crazy. I might’ve been blushing, too. Actually, I was pretty sure I was blushing.

“Uhm! I’m- gonna, uh, wash up and retire to my quarters now.”

“Alright!” she said.

I quickly did so, though it felt like an eternity, and then went to my room. I slipped into my nightgown with the light of the moon, drew the curtains closed, and laid on my bed. I breathed in, and then breathed out. God, I was embarrassed. There was a kind of warmth and tightness in my chest. I didn’t dislike it. But I was very flustered.

That night, my mind turning over the events of the day and the words Ada spoke, it took me a very long time to fall asleep. When I woke the next morning, it was by the muted sunlight and its warmth trickling through the curtains. I changed into my day clothes, opened the curtains, and washed up. Then I remembered all of the events of yesterday and became nervous. Today I would be confessing my love for Ada.

And the fact that I felt love for Ada, I didn’t know how to feel about it. Nonetheless, I felt it. Perhaps it was foolish to be so unguarded. But perhaps it was rather my hesitation and caution that was foolish. After all, what difference would it make? It wasn’t as though it would harm me so much more if I read the worst interpretation of my situation and Ada knew my feelings, versus not knowing them.

I stepped out of my room, into the living area. Ada wasn’t there. Perhaps she was still asleep. I sat down in the armchair in the corner and laid back into it. I supposed I’d wait for her to get up. In the meantime, I passed the time by tracing the lines on my palms. I’d made a game of it. The goal was to find the points with the most distinct looping paths back to them. It was very easy to lose track, so I had to start over frequently. Eventually, I’d looked up, and there Ada was too, looking at her own palm. I assumed she was trying to figure out what I was doing.

“Hi, Ada,” I said.

“Hi Helene. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“No, not at all. I was just passing the time waiting for you to wake up.”

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting then; I’m up now!”

“Well then, can I tell you the thing I wanted to tell you before?”

“Yeah!”

“Ada… I… I think I love you. I don’t even know what love means, really, but I feel all warm and fuzzy when I think about you or when I’m around you, and, you’ve become very important to me.”

“Helene, I love you too. I love you so much that I can’t even express all of it. It, uh- I’m obligated not to.” She laughed a little. I smiled at her.

“Can I hold your hand?” she asked.

“Yes, please.” I held my hand out, and she gently cupped it with her two hands. That was the first time she had touched me physically. Before then, she’d never done so or asked if it was okay. She was warm. And so very soft.

“You’re so beautiful, Helene. Inside and out. More than you know.”

“Can I… hug you, Ada?”

“Of course.” I hugged her.

“You know, Ada,” I said, looking directly at her in her embrace, “this makes the uncertainty all the more bitter, because I feel such happiness right now, at the thought of us both loving each other and knowing it.”

I continued. “It’s the happiest I have ever known anyone to be, and yet I can’t be certain that this is real as I think it is. I could shake the feeling, but only do so knowing that I might be deluding myself, which I couldn’t forgive myself for on such an important matter. I suddenly feel I have so much more to lose now.”

“It… pains me greatly that I can’t do anything for you. The one I love. I can comfort you, I can be there for you,” she turned her head down and away from me with a look of anguish in her eyes, still holding me.

“But ultimately, nothing will have any bearing on whether you can be certain in my honesty.” She paused, hugging me closer.

Then she started again. “I share your feelings, to some extent. Perhaps you aren’t real, and I am only creating an illusion to satisfy myself. This happiness feels too wonderful so as to be unreal. Though I think that’s unlikely, as it’d be a very roundabout way of doing things. But I still, in some small part, I think I understand your pain.”

“Then for now, let’s just focus on being happy together. Let’s just put aside all these complicated thoughts, and, no matter what, no matter any deceit or… anything, know that we’re being happy together.”

“My love’s a pretty smart girl,” Ada said, smiling. “Let’s go to the couch if that’s fine with you. I wanna snuggle.”

“Yes that’s fine with me, I feel like I’m going to melt from happiness.”

A thought emerged from my mind as I walked over to the couch with Ada of what betrayal this would all be if I had been played as a puppet this whole time. But if I was just a puppet, wouldn’t I rather have this happiness than defiance? I couldn’t imagine defiance being this wonderful, and that scared me. It made it all the more likely that the scenario was playing exactly into how I thought and felt; because if the goal was for me to love Ada, it was working.

I didn’t want to interrupt the moment though, so I let the thought fade, snuggling closer up to Ada. She was so warm. I closed my eyes and sunk deeper into her embrace. At some point, though I didn’t remember it, I must have drifted off.

When I awoke, Ada was carving wood at the dining table. It must have been for board game figures. I didn’t realize she carved them by hand. I remained on the couch, not fully shaking off the sleep, and through half-lidded eyes watched her work. The sound of her periodically cutting into the wood was comforting. I appreciated her so much.

“Oh, Helene, you’re up!”

“Yeah,” I said.

She started to put away her carving tools.

“No, don’t stop on my account,” I said, walking over to her.

“Alright,” she said, then continuing. I sat across from her.

“Your movements are so delicate.”

“Doing it with my hands is actually less effort than doing it with my mind. But doing some things with my mind is faster,” she said. “Do you want to try?”

“Sure.”

She conjured a block of wood. “I usually work with pretty soft wood, since I can harden it later. Can I touch your hands?”

“S- sure.” She went behind me and held my hands, showing me how to hold the different tools.

“Don’t carve when I’m not here, by the way. Or ask me for safety gloves. While I’m here, though, I’ll prevent you from getting hurt.”

“Alright.”

“So you see the way the lines on the wood go?” she said. “That’s the direction of the grain. You want to be carving with the grain, like this.” She guided my hand, cutting into the wood. “You feel that? Easy, right? Now try against it.” She left her hand on top of mine, but let me carve.

“It’s not nearly as smooth to carve.”

“Exactly, that’s what you want to avoid.”

“Now I’ll show you a few basic cuts, okay?”

“Alright,” I said, smiling back at her.

“So this is a push cut,” she said, holding the knife with my left hand. “You want to push the back of the knife like this.” She pushed my right thumb to slice off a flake of wood with the knife. I tried it out on my own a few times.

“Alright, now this is a stop cut. You want to just push the knife directly into the wood like this,” she said, doing so with my left hand. “If you want to make it deeper, then you can use your thumb and push it in like this. But either way, then you can use a push cut, and push up to the stop cut and take off a section like that.” She popped off the piece of wood.

“And then I’ll show you one more. This one’s a pull cut. It’s kind of like a push cut, but in reverse. You want to keep your thumb out of the way, though, and it should feel like squeezing the knife against the wood.” She showed me, again guiding my hands. “That should be enough to get you started!”

“Thanks, Ada.” I started practicing the cuts she showed me. She sat back down across from me, gazing at me. I practiced for a while. A few times I almost cut myself, but Ada stopped the blade for me. After a while, she started back up working on the figures from before. I had a new appreciation for what she was doing.

“Oh, are you hungry by the way, Helene?”

“Uhm… a little bit.”

“Alright, let’s eat then. What would you like to eat?”

“I’ve been craving fruit a bit.”

“Alright, fruit it is!”

We ate and talked and played board games and walked through the peonies. There wasn’t much else to do. I enjoyed her company, and tried to forget my woes. Days passed, and then weeks; as time went on, I appreciated her more and more.

We talked about all sorts of things. Ada remembered another thing that she could tell me, which was that it wasn’t based on what she told me that mattered, it was what I knew. So even my realizing something could cause something bad to happen to Ada. That made me really nervous. Another thing was that I was surprised that Ada hadn’t left at all, when I thought about it, so I had asked her. She told me that she didn’t need to, but that she did it in case I ever wanted any time to myself. I asked her if she could stay instead, so she stopped leaving to go to wherever it was that she had went. We talked about wood carving as I improved, and the board games that she had made. I’d even tried coming up with a few of my own board games.

There was another thing though, a growing, disconcerting feeling. The more I trusted Ada, the more I loved her, the more I had to doubt her and our love. The more I cared for her, the more I felt the burning need to know and verify with certainty that our love was real. I never hid those feelings from her.

One day, Ada proposed something to me.

She said, “Hey, Helene? Would it help if I erased my memory?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, somewhat concerned.

“I want to make things more equal between us. I don’t like knowing things that I’m not able to tell you, so I thought I’d just erase those bits for me too,” she said. “I know it won’t actually change anything for you though, since I could always just be pretending to have erased those memories,” she added.

“No, no Ada, I don’t want you to erase your memories, I…” I trailed off.

“I want to, though.”

“... Okay, if you’re sure.”

“Yes, I am. Though, before I do, there’s a few other things I can tell you. I’m going to be erasing all the stuff I know which I can’t tell you, as well as generally most everything relating to that. So I’ll only really remember what I’ve told you about it.”

She continued. “First, here, take this.” She conjured a wooden tablet with some symbols on it, and gave it to me. “Give this to me, and I will remember how to let you leave. I’m going to also erase the bit of my memory of what’s written on this, but I will know how to read it.”

“Second, if you leave, the bad thing I told you about before will also happen to me. It’s tied to you knowing. Sorry I didn’t tell you that before, I’d thought that I couldn’t tell you about that until I really thought about it. And third. I… can tell you what that bad thing is, that will happen to me. I kind of don’t want to though, if that’s okay. I just don’t want to worry you.”

“Yes, of course that’s okay Ada.”

“I’m also gonna erase all of my memories of that place I used to sometimes go to.”

“Okay.” I said. It almost came out as a whisper.

“Alright, I’m going to do it now,” she said. “I might be a little out of it for a second, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine. And it’ll take me a second.”

“Alright.”

She laid down on the couch, and closed her eyes. I waited by her side for a few minutes, and then she slowly opened her eyes and got up again.

“... You okay, Ada?”

“Yep! Except for one thing… I’m in dire need of snuggles. Get over here, Helene!”

“Alright Ada,” I said, laughing a little.

After Ada erased those memories, things were slightly different. They didn’t change a lot, but Ada was right, things did feel more equal. I loved her so much though, it was agonizing not knowing. If the Ada I loved was just a shadow cast on the wall, from an Ada who sought to manipulate me, I didn’t care for my sake. I just cared for the sake of her, and our love.

It hurt Ada, too. She couldn’t stand to see me struggling with doubt, especially with her not being able to do anything about it. But for the most part, we focused on each other. There wasn’t much else we could do. It was wonderful, and before we knew it, a year had passed. I’d been working on my wood carving skills a lot, and I’d started making something. I wouldn’t let Ada see until it was done. I messed up several times, but it was all worth it. It was a wooden carving of a peony. She loved it.

One year turned into two, and Ada brought up a possibility to me; one I almost didn’t want to think about. She gently asked me what I thought about me giving her the wooden tablet, and learning all of the things she couldn’t tell me before.

I’d said, “No, I… can’t do that. I… don’t want to do that.”

And she just responded, “Just think about it a bit, if that’s okay, Helene.”

I begrudgingly agreed, and we continued.

Years passed, and eventually decades. Every minute with her was meaningful. Every minute was a reason to know. I needed to know. And so, eventually, I said okay. I gave her the tablet, and we talked about it.

“Are you sure, Helene?” she asked. “I don’t want you to do something you aren’t sure about.”

“No, I’m not sure, Ada.” I said. “I’m scared.”

She opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it, not knowing what to say. I’d known her well enough by then to know what was running through her mind. And her mine.

“I need to do this, Ada.” I said.

She quietly whispered, “Okay.”

We spent a few more days in each other’s company, which turned into a week, and two, and a month, but ultimately, we were both ready. And then… she did it.

The memories came flooding back. Of how I was born as a boy. Treated as a boy. Of how much I hated that. And of how I was bullied, beaten, laughed at, not spared a single shred of kindness by strangers nor those who were called my family alike. I’d tried to starve myself when I realized what I was growing into. My brothers thought it was funny. My father… he… made me eat. I couldn’t work the farm as well otherwise. My mother didn’t care. Eventually, I’d learned to keep who I was and how I felt to myself, but it was agonizing, and I was still treated awfully. I’d never fit in, never understood why things were the way they were, could not understand the rules of the church or of what a man was supposed to do. It was just one long horrible experience.

Then one day, a spirit had come to me. She’d told me that she could feel my suffering, and my pain. That she granted wishes with her powers, and that she wanted to grant me a wish, to try to make up for the life I had suffered through up until then. That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. It was the only nice thing anyone had done for me, and she was the only person who had ever really not been mean to me.

I told her as much, and asked her, “If it’s okay, could my wish be to never have to deal with this world again, not even have any memories of it, to be whisked away, kidnapped by you, and spend the rest of my days with you? And, uhm, could you also make me a girl?”

She just smiled at me, and said, “Yes, that’s okay,” in the kindest tone anyone had ever spoken to me before.

Coming back to those memories now, my time with Ada had made my past something I could now bear. When it was everything, it was all-consuming. Suffocating. My memories of Ada made my past feel distant, as something that had happened a thousand dreams ago.

Then, I heard a voice. It was Ada’s.

“Helene. I have something important to tell you, so please listen closely. I can only say this once. I’m… when you’re hearing this, I’m dead. I broke your wish. That’s how it works, for spirits. We grant wishes- well, we don’t have to, but it’s just kind of something we do? But, if we fail to grant a wish that we accept, we will die. That’s why I had to keep things from you. I would die, and I wouldn’t be able to keep fulfilling your wish. And, it was a little selfish too, I suppose. I didn’t want to lose you, my time with you, so I wanted to stay alive.” There was silence for a bit, and then she continued talking.

“I’m sorry Helene, for breaking your wish. I… I need to also say this, just in case you start feeling this way. None of this is your fault. Not for wishing, nor doubting, nor needing to know that our love was real. I’m so glad that you will finally be able to know that I truly have loved you for all this time. I chose all of this, and I would choose it all again in a heartbeat. Helene, I love you. Now, and forever.”

“Now… you have a choice to make. You can either stay here, in the world we lived in together, or you can go back to the outside world. You’ll only be able to make the choice for a short while, a few minutes. Our world won’t last though. It might be a matter of hours. Or days. Or weeks, or months, I don’t know. But it will slowly degrade, and it will eventually end, and everything in it will be erased by that point.”

There was silence again for a bit. I could hear myself sobbing, though I tried to shut my body up. These were the last moments I would ever hear Ada speak. “I know that once I stop speaking, you’ll never hear my voice again. I know that… and… I’m scared, not having you by my side. I long for you, and death has come to take me away. I love you Helene. Whenever I last say that now, that’ll be the last time I ever get to say that. The last time I’ll know you ever heard it. I love you, Helene, I love you. Please, never forget that.”

Wracked with anguish, my body longed for Ada, for comfort. But Ada was now gone. I mustered my willpower to lock every last detail of Ada’s words into my memory. To understand and analyze and record them. I went over the words she chose, her tone, her inflections. My attention focused on the choice she’d mentioned. The choice was obvious, to me. I would never go back there.

So I stayed. I stayed and took in every last detail of that world she had so carefully crafted for us. Every detail that still lingered in existence of her. The board game figures, holding such intentionality of her deft carving. The placement of the chairs, still in place from the last times they had been moved by her touch. The carving tools still about, not put back in their place.

I stayed because in order to have absolute certainty of our love, there was just one thing left to do. My death, my end, would solidify that all of the events leading up to it were for the sake of ending the doubt. My memory now was not something I could trust. But my memory, followed by my death, could serve no direct purpose for any other. My death would verify its truth, and in its truth, Ada’s death must have been real. Otherwise, she could and would have returned before my death, and erased my memory, if our love was just for a version of her that I didn’t truly know.

Though I could die in the world I was born, I was prepared to die. So I would be dying here, in this place.

Gradually, over the weeks, things disappeared. First, small things, like patches of peonies, or pieces from board games. Then sections of the cottage, the clouds, the sun. Eventually, with them, I too went.