Epilogue: Filtered Light and the Book

I think they meant it,
When they said you can't buy love;
Now I know you can rent it,
A new lease you were, my love, on life.
All my life
I've longed to discover,
Something as true
As this is...

-RENT, "I'll Cover You Reprise"

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Having already fastened a suction cup to his bedroom window, Hurley gently hung the ornament from its little hook and stood back to admire it.

The craftsman who had done it for him had tried to talk him out of it. The pieces of glass were too different in size and shape and curvature, he said, and he wouldn't be able to make a clean-cut shape from it. Hurley hadn't cared; not everything in life was so neatly constructed, and that was fine. It didn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.

In the end, however, the craftsman had agreed—the fact that Hurley was paying him probably had a lot to do with that—and set to work blunting and smoothing the sharp edges of the glass shards. The fragments were soldered together, and a string was looped through a small eyelet of wire at the top.

It wasn't any shape conventional to geometry, or a pretty, whimsical one either. It was disorganized and messy-looking and he loved it. The sunlight passing through it was stained rose and blue and green, projected onto his sheets as a softly glowing miasma. It hit the right side of the bed, the side she had slept on when she had still been with him.

He smiled softly at the sun catcher, all that was left of the broken wineglass. The glass itself, as an object of its own, was gone, but it had left its pieces behind. They couldn't be put back together into a wineglass again, but they could take a new shape and cast such beautiful light for him.

A lot of things seemed to work that way.

He had begun the process of moving on with his life: he stored most of his paintings and sketches in the hall closet, leaving only a few of his favorites up. The painting of them on the plane, him stepping on her foot, had been shoved in the incinerator and burned—it had been a lie, and there was no reason to keep it around anymore. He was getting out of the house just to breathe fresh air, cooking healthier food, and even starting some mild exercise when he was in the privacy of his own home. He was more secure in himself, but not quite confident enough to join a gym. Not just yet.

He had been so lonely and depressed and grief-stricken for the first few days alone, but the worst of it had eventually passed. She had told him she had loved him more than anything or anyone else, and it must have been true, because she had finally been able to sacrifice her own happiness to let him go. Even though it hurt them both, she had done what was best for him. He was finally able to accept that, as well as her love, and he was grateful to her now for going through with what he himself could never have done. He still missed her, and he supposed that he always would. That pain would always be there. But that was okay with him, because when you came right down to it, it meant that he had truly loved her with all of his heart.

When she had vanished, all of her things had disappeared with her: her clothes, her books, her movies. He didn't care about any of that; the only thing that made a difference to him was the fact that her engagement ring had gone with her as well. She had taken it along on her journey, and that brought him some measure of comfort. Wherever she might be now, she was still wearing it, and it was a bond that could not be severed, not even by death.

Yeah, he thought he could live without her if he tried. It was hard, but not impossible. She was gone now, but nothing could erase the time they had spent together. And that was enough.

He turned around and made for the bed, meaning to sit there and bathe in the colored glow from the sun catcher, when his foot bumped into something just under the bed frame. Bending to retrieve it, he was surprised to find that she hadn't taken everything she had owned back into death.

It was the novel she had been reading, the one that had given him the creeps. He blew the light film of dust from the cover, and read the title to himself once more: House of Leaves. Running his fingers across it, he found something sticking up from between the pages. It was the red ribbon bookmark she had held onto but never actually used, or so he had thought.

He cracked open the book to find a passage that she had gone over in yellow highlighter, on page 518. Intrigued, he sat down on the edge of the mattress to read it.

Of course there will always be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it. Historical or not. Sometimes it seems like a cat, the panther with its moon mad gait or a tiger with stripes of ash and eyes as wild as winter oceans. Sometimes it's the curve of a wrist or what's left or romance, still hidden in the drawer of some long lost nightstand or carefully drawn in the margins of an old discarded calendar.

Sometimes it's just a vapor trail speeding west, prophetic, over clouds aglow with dangerous light. Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they're born out of something much more akin to a voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard even by the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.

Just as you have swept through me.

Just as I now sweep through you.

Closing his eyes, he pressed the book to his lips and sighed.

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-fin-