Arslan screamed as he fell into the hollow, deeper, and deeper, and deeper. The kind of falling that takes everything with it: sound, name, breath. Until there is nothing left but the fall itself.
YA ALLLLAHHHHHH.
Into the void. Into the emptiness. The cry went out ahead of him and the void gave back nothing. And when the last of it had left him, when his voice found its floor before his body did, he opened his eyes to the room.
That room. The one he somehow always knew.
Grief was sitting in the corner, the way she always sits. Blue dress. Tan skin. Wild black hair loose around her face. Eyes like ice, pale and still, cold in a way that has nothing against you. She was waiting.
She was always waiting.
Waiting was what she did best, not in a hurtful or mean way, not the way of someone who withholds, but in a way that is absolute. The way stone waits. The way the dark waits at the end of every day.
He found the floor. He stayed there.
She didn't move toward him. She didn't look away.
Everyone must pay the price for love. She was only there to receive the payment.
And receive she would. But grief did not know what she was walking into.
This was not a simple exchange. The moment she sat down in that room, she agreed to something older and heavier than she understood. A binding contract, and not just with Arslan. With all of them.
Kevin. Amir. The boy who stood in a wet puddle on the floor, trembling, watching his father's hands do what hands should never do to the woman who made him. The teenager who held a child of his own before he'd finished becoming one himself.
She couldn't meet one. She had to meet all.
Arslan understood this. He was the one who would make the introductions.
One by one, he brought them forward. One by one, grief looked into the face of what had been carried. When Amir stepped into the light, something in her shifted. When the boy came, the one who learned that floors are where you end up, that fear has a smell, that a mother's leg can be broken by the man who was supposed to make the world feel safe, grief began to crack. Something moved across her face that had never moved there before.
But it was the man who finished it.
Thirty-eight years old. And what he brought her was not violence or terror or any of the sharp things. What he brought her was small. Warm. A woman's voice saying his name like it meant something. Hands that knew how to find him in any dark. The smell of something good from a kitchen that no longer exists.
His mom-mom.
Gone.
Grief opened her mouth and what came out had no name. A shriek so vivid, so naked, so full of everything she had ever received and never felt, that the earth shifted under the weight of it. Walls shook. The air cracked open.
And Kevin stood there.
And Arslan stood there.
And the boy, and the teenager, and Amir, and the man who is all of them and has always been all of them, they stood there.
Not one of them faltered. Not one of them shook. Not one of them recoiled.
Because they had been carrying this long before grief knew what to call it. Before she had a dress or a room or eyes to receive it with. They had carried it in their bodies, in their sleep, in the silence before a door opens, in every room that was supposed to be safe and wasn't.
Millennia.
And when the scream finished, it did not finish cleanly. It finished the way a body finishes after it has given everything. Depleted. Gutted. Hollow in the way that only comes after something real has moved through you.
Grief looked up.
Her wild black hair was loose across her face. Her ice eyes, wet for the first time. She looked at all of them standing there, all of them in that one body, and she asked the only question she had left.
"All of you? In one body?"
Not with pity. Not with horror. With the kind of awe that arrives only when you have witnessed something you cannot un-witness.
She had sat in rooms like this for as long as there had been rooms. She thought she knew what the human condition was.
She had not known.
It is not one grief. It is many. Trapped in one body, meant to live in the rooms where love used to be. Wandering those rooms. Touching the walls. Remembering where things were before they were gone.
Not completely evil. Not a punishment. Beautifully broken, in the way that broken things sometimes are when what shattered them was love and not indifference.
And the only thing that alleviates it, she understood now, is not the end of grief. It is the expansion into something larger than grief. Old age. Wisdom earned rather than given. The quiet accumulation of a life long-lived. The moment when you become large enough to hold something greater than yourself.
Knowing love.
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