Member-only story
The Authentic Eclectic
Horologium Drowning
what is forgotten never was
Happiness was impossible before it came. Though she could not remember her infant days, the unhappiness stretched back as far as memory permitted, and what is forgotten never was. Her parents doted over her and each other like doves, and her little brother was a cherubim; furthermore, she was gifted with beauty and good health, and did not struggle with her schoolwork or socialization. There was no obvious reason for misery.
If she may have given a reason, one single reason, it would have been the wistful expression glimpsed in her mother’s face by way of the window one summer dusk as an approaching storm deepened the dark. Either that was the first time she had seen it, or it was the first time she was old enough to register such a complex mood: it was not quite melancholy but something subtler, suited to a gorilla who has been in a cage a very long time, or a dog whose master is never coming home. Her mother turned, and the expression dissolved in a smile of greeting. The translucent face in the window seemed like another woman, another mother.
No, this was not the cause of her own unhappiness, but rather a means of describing it, which preceded that moment and stretched out across others like it. By her understanding, some people are ways that have…
