-- There are harder things to bear.
The sunlight changes Slits of light crawl up the walls. It occurs to Stephanie to wonder if it's still today, or if that was some time ago. Her pupils have long since started to seesaw, closing and dilating by turns, dimming and glaring the room. She can't even summon up the will to stand and leave. When it can't go on, that's when this will end. Then they'll never see each other again, except for always.
Her eyes burn. She blinks, numb, dumb, ravenous, wrecked, and badly in need of emptying her bladder. Something keeps her from breathing--this frail, scarred woman who won't look away. Pinned in that look, she becomes something else, huge and fixed, swaying in the wind and pelted by rain. The whole urgent calculus of need--what she called her life--shrinks down to a pore on the underside of a life, wa out on the tip of a wind-dipped branch, high up in the crown of a community too big for any glance to take in. And way down below, subterranean, in the humus, through the roots of humility, gifts fow.
Her cheeks tense up. She wants to shout, Who are you? Why won't you stop? No one has ever looked at me like this, except to judge, rob, or rape me. In my whole life, my whole life, never" Her face reddens. With slow, heavy, disbelieving swings of her head, she starts to cry. The tears do whatever they want. Call it sobbing. The therapist is crying, too.
-- Why? Why am I sick? What's wrong with me?
-- Loneliness. But not for people. You're mourning a thing you never even knew.
-- What thing?
-- A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing--one you didn't even know was yours to lose.
-- Where dit it go?
-- Into making us. But it still wants something.
Stephanie is up and out of the chair, clinging to the stranger. Taking her by the shoulders. Nodding, crying, nodding. And the stranger lets her. Of course, grief. Grief for a thing too big to see. Mimi pulls back to ask if Stephanie is all right. All right to leave. All right to drive. But Stephanie puts fingers on her mouth and hushes the therapist forever.
-- from The Overstory by Richard Powers
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