Mistwalker

TWELVE Grey

My kitchen is empty now. The stairs, silent. My sitting room nothing but a museum. I have a bowl of broth for supper, and two slices of bread. They go untouched as I flick through the pages of my book.

Sometimes, I realize that my routine is a lie. I’m not real. My body isn’t flesh. I don’t need to shave, or to eat, or to sleep. When I cut my hair, I’m only rearranging the mist that shapes me. When I tremble in Willa’s presence, I fool myself into believing my emotions are sensations.

I touch her, and in that moment, I trust my hand rests on her shoulder. If I were to cling to her or card my fingers through the light that should be her hair, I would believe it.

She would too.

It’s magic’s perception. All these things I do, I do because they’re vestiges of my humanity. I have habits, because I still consider myself a human being.

But now . . . so close to becoming real again, the artifice is never more evident to me. Trailing my gaze along the walls, I notice the edges of the illusion. Those places where I failed to expect something. Mist hangs in those spaces, obscuring the incomplete picture that is my prison.

This, I realize, is why the only room in the lighthouse is the room I’m in. The stairs come and go because I only need them when I walk to the lantern galley. Because it makes sense for my bedchamber to be above the kitchen.

Willa’s presence looms. I feel her in every room now. I hear her voice in the grinding gears of the lamp. I see flickers of copper in my kitchen; her chair isn’t tucked beneath the table where it belongs. It sits at an angle, just as she left it.

Closing my eyes, I hold myself painfully still. In the dark, nothing exists around me. Now that I understand this, I blossom with a terrible fear. This lighthouse is empty. These dinners are lies. The beribboned boxes at my plate are fantasy.

Now that I know this, now that I can so keenly feel the difference between flesh and fantasy, what will I see when I open my eyes?

With a breath I don’t need, I steel myself. Then I look.

The kitchen remains the kitchen. The black stove radiates warmth; my fish broth has gone cold. With my fingers lifted, my book’s pages flicker and flip, losing my place. Willa’s chair remains askew. The walls vibrate still from the mechanicals working overhead. An ordinary, awful listing of things that simply are.

There’s a difference between thinking and believing. I can no more prove myself unreal than I can prove myself real. Finer philosophers and thinkers than I have tried it; some may have achieved it. Ascendance from their mortal remains, existing as pure thought and naught else.

My logic was ruined when I closed my eyes. To truly accept my nothingness, I would have needed to believe that I had no eyes to close.

“I hope you’re embarrassed,” I tell myself.

Stirring my broth, I upset the sediment in the bowl. It swirls, white haze like fog.