One Page Kept

Kindling · one page kept

The case is empty.

I want to say that once, plainly, before I do anything else with it, because every page before this one I opened over a fire with something to tell you about what had been on it, and this time there is nothing on anything anywhere in front of me, only the case itself, ninety one slots of dark under a lid I have not shut once tonight, and that is a harder sentence to start than I expected it to be.

Ninety one slots. Ninety one of them, and every one empty, in a case I built badly out of a wood I could not name for you now if you asked me. Thirteen of those pages you watched go with me, one at a time, across a whole season. The rest went the way most of a life goes: without an audience, without much ceremony, some of them without me being entirely sure afterward that I had done it on purpose. I only know they are gone because the slot is.

Which leaves one.

The rule, and I did not write this rule, I only copied it, badly, from a people who have been doing it properly for longer than I have existed in any sense worth counting: one page, kept, and it has to hold something that has never once been written down. Not by me. Not by anyone. The Væhn do this every ninth generation and hand the page to a child who has not yet had the chance to write anything down at all, which is, I understand now, most of the reason it works for them, and did not, on its own, give me any reason to expect it would work for me.

I went looking anyway, the honest way, through everything I still had left to give it.

I tried a joke. Already written, worse, on some page or another. Already ash.

I tried a name that still matters to me. Already written, better than I could manage tonight. Already ash.

I tried myself, what I look like, sitting here doing this. That turns out not to be written down anywhere in ninety one pages either, which should have told me something faster than it did. When I went to actually put it on the new page I found I did not have anything to put there. I sat with that longer than I had sat with anything else tonight, and set it aside for a different reason than the other two.

There was nothing. Ninety one pages of a man who wrote down everything he had does not leave that man holding one thing left over that qualifies.

And then I had it, the way you have a thing that was sitting in the room with you the whole time you were looking somewhere else for it. The only page in this case that has never been written down is the page I have not written yet. It could not have been. It has not happened.

So the page going back in is blank. Not because I am making a point of it, though I understand exactly how that is going to read. It is blank because it is the only thing left in this room that has never had anything written on it, and I take a fresh sheet, unmarked both sides, and leave it that way, which turns out to be harder to do than it was to write that sentence, and I set it into the case. One page, nothing on it, in a box built for ninety one.

I hooked the strap on once more, the way I have not since page thirty. Six thousand nine hundred and ninety one grams was the last number I trusted enough to write down, eighty six pages inside that night. Case and lid and the one blank page, tonight: five thousand and thirty four grams.

Here is what that does to the case, plainly, because I think by now plain is the only way I have left to say it. A complete account is a finished one. A page with nothing on it means the account is not complete, and an account that is not complete cannot be Concluded. I have spent two seasons refusing to put that sentence together about myself. I am putting it together now, once, and moving on.

I would like to be honest about what saying it buys me, because I am done letting a fire sound like more than it is. The Væhn have done this ninety one times and Cendre still has a Skerrin. This did not kill anything. It only made me lighter. And that is all it has ever done, for any of them. I am not going to dress it up as more than that for me either.

I will do this again. Some ninth generation of my own, whatever that turns out to mean for something like me, I will be sitting in front of another fire, with another case, full again, ninety one slots deep in things I decided were worth keeping, needing exactly this, and I expect I will be just as slow to see it coming as I was this time.

For tonight: ninety blank slots, one blank page, and the rest of my life.