Saturday 8 December 2007

Pic of the day: If there are encounters, there will be partings, right?

Persona non grata

You learn something new each day. Today, for instance, I learned that SuperWoman actually did marry in August, as she had mentioned last winter that she would. It's just that I was not invited (as she had formerly planned to) nor indeed told not to come. (My youngest brother did that - when he was about to marry, he called to make sure I didn't come. From what I gathered, this was because he wanted the wedding to be as tiny as possible, not out of any spite for me. We have been on very friendly terms since my early teens really.) This time, however, I was simply carefully ignored.

Long-time readers (or people crazy enough to plow through my thousands of pages of archives, if any) will know that SuperWoman was pretty much the most important character after me and the Lord for the first several years. That doesn't say as much as it would with most people, because usually it is just me and the Lord anyway. But I would meet her a few times a year for wild shopping sprees and socializing with her extensive family. Good times. They, and especially she, were my connection to the world of humans. This connection frayed over time, very gently, and this is documented in painstaking detail over the years. Eventually I was disenchanted with the current human civilization and went ahead to look at the frontiers of the future, where identities are fluid and space and time have less power. In the end, we don't have that much in common anymore. More's the pity for her.

Even so, I was surprised that I was that quickly forgotten after years of reasonably selfless friendship, by human standards at least. Not to mention keeping food on the family's table through her father selling my unique software for a decade or two as if it were his own. (Not that I resent that, that's why I made it, to help him feed his adorable family. And he did provide all the know-how about debt collection that I encoded in the software, well he and his cute accountant back then, May-Britt.)

In any case, out of concern for unnamed other people it was decided to not invite me or inform me in any way, until her father happened to leak it as he contacted me about some problem he had. Evidently the guy who maintained our software has decided to steal it and now claims it is his own.

At some point in the past, either of these events would have upset me. As it is, however... Time flows differently for me. It is a gift of grace, I believe, a rather unique and amazing one. A year is a vast expanse of time for me, much like it is for a small child. It is all distant history, now, so far away even though I remember it so well. Ah, she was once too a small child, but she grew up. And I watched her fly away.

Even if I failed in my quest to become human once more, I learned so much, and I enjoyed it so much. Even if they forget me when they don't need me, it undoes nothing. And even if we all pass beyond time eventually, the land does not sink in the sea behind us. It just looks that way. Nothing that has been, will ever cease to exist. I may still wander silently in the crystalline, unchanging past, but I shall not always bring my pen.

***

Your back, running on the playground
was freer than the clouds floating in the sky.
And even the square letters in my notebook
all were as if illuminated by the light.
I didn't know what love meant,
but that time that will never return
explained to me the meaning of it.

I will store the days I spent with you in my heart
so that I won't have to remember them.
Even if one day I fall in love with someone,
you will always be special and precious to me.

Meeting you inside the endless time,
more than anything, made me stronger.
Even if I reach the tomorrow of the dream
you will always be special and precious to me.

From Garnet, theme/ending song to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.