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Her name was is used to be is could be —
Dani. At some point, either far in the past or right now or maybe at some time that hasn’t happened yet, her name is Dani.
She does not exist in a place where time matters. She knows that it did matter, at some point — going places, getting places, being places at a certain time. She knows that it was or is or will be important to her. But in the Now, time does not matter.
(Perhaps time matters more Now than it ever did. If time didn’t matter, how would she know that she is in the Now?)
She floats, and sleeps, and dreams. It does not matter how long she sleeps. It matters more than anything.
She sleeps.
She wakes.
She walks.
The bedroom, rages the Lady, who screams with a voice gone silent and gnashes teeth that no longer exist. We must go to the bedroom, they are waiting, they are waiting for me.
Who? asks the spirit who was or is or will be Dani. Who waits?
The Lady does not answer. The Lady does not know.
She walks. The entire world is silent and covered in gloom and mist and grief. The entire world is the manor and the gardens and the forest and it ends at the gate.
(Was the world bigger, once?)
There is a name. She wants to remember this name. This name is was should be important. She cannot remember the name, but the name is…in the forest, perhaps. Something is in the forest. She needs to see what is in the forest.
She walks, and she walks, and the muddy footprints lead deeper and deeper into the forest. She does not know why. She walks anyway.
The Lady wails and pulls at her hair in her grief. The Lady cannot remember who or what it is that she is grieving, but it does not lessen the burn and the punch and the roaring hollow of the pain. The forgetting is nearly as painful as the loss.
The moonflower is blooming. It is not always blooming. Perhaps this is why time is so important in the Now — because sometimes the moonflower blooms, and sometimes it does not. When it blooms, there is a certain kind of pain in her chest, and it is warm like fresh coals and heavy like wool blankets and soft like thistle down. When it does not, the pain in her chest is cold and dark and dank like the mud at the bottom of her lake.
(“It’s not really a lake,” she remembers someone saying. Someone important? “Just a dirty old pond.”)
When the moonflower blooms, she sits on the log and stares at it for as long as she can bear — or until the Lady drags her back towards the manor, both of them keening their grief. When the moonflower does not bloom, she sinks back into the mud and the cold and the dark, and she clings to the memory of a gold ring and a tiny kitchen and music, music, music, until the dark and the cold overwhelm her and she sleeps.
She wakes.
She walks.
There is a pull, deep inside her — a wanting, a needing, that demands that anything within her orbit give way to the constant need of her grief, submit to the weight and the ache of the pain that lives in her chest. She wants to pull everything warm and alive and loving into herself, to fill the empty parts of her with anything that still breathes and loves and remembers. To balance out the missing pieces with love that belongs to those still living.
She does not give in to it. The Lady gave into it, she knows. She almost lost someone (someone important?) because the Lady tried to fill those aching empty places. The Lady is still empty, but now she is here, and nothing else has changed. She will not give in. She is empty, but in different ways. She remembers a time when she was not empty at all.
She remembers — god, she remembers nearly nothing at all — but she clings, she clings fiercely, to the ghost of a glimpse of a memory; sunlight on warm brown hair, dirt on faded denim, a reluctant smile, an easy wit.
It is not truly a memory. A memory requires faces, places, names, sounds, scents. She holds only the barest hint of a feeling, like a hand brushing against the back of her neck. But the brush of this hand; the hint of this scent, the barest idea of this woman; this she will cling to forever, if she must.
Forever? How long is that? Hasn’t she already spent forever here, with the muck and the mud and the moonflowers — It does not matter. She will keep this. She has lost everything, everything, everything — Can she not just keep this, just this?
You cannot keep this, says the Lady. The Lady is mocking her. The Lady is sympathetic. The Lady is hurting. The Lady hurts for her. The Lady remembers nothing but grief, understands nothing but loss. You will lose even this, the most important of things, in time. You are only human. You are not meant to last.
She cannot forget this. Gold rings, tiny kitchens, potted plants —
You cannot keep her. Sleep. Forget.
Brown curls, dirty overalls, battered gardening gloves —
Go back. Go back. Go back. She is not here. Perhaps next time.
Moonflowers, moonflowers, moonflowers.
She returns to the lake.
She sleeps.
She wakes.
She walks.
The moonflower is blooming. It does not always bloom.
This time, in the Now, it is blooming. Next time, or perhaps before, it will not be.
She sits, and she watches the bloom. She watches it die.
She returns to the lake.
She sleeps — and in sleeping, forgets.
Somewhere, sometime, a moonflower is blooming.