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Some of my readers may be wondering why it is that I know so much about The Woman.

``How does she know all of this?'' some might be wondering. ``Does she really know all these things that The Woman did? Does she know who the kindly shop owner is? The one who pet on The Woman as she sobbed from too spicy a chili?'' Others might be wondering --- and rightly so! --- ``How much of this is actually real? Surely she does not know The Woman's innermost thoughts! All this talk of ideas in shapes being set before her is quite silly.''

My answer is that tired phrase: ``It is complicated.'' Of course I do not know her innermost thoughts. I think it is a me thing to take abstract ideas and pretend they look like pretty baubles or hot coals or little statuettes to be placed upon a dresser. I cannot read minds, and I do not have any memories from The Woman. I do not even know quite what she is anymore! I would not know if she quit, since I am not down-tree from her --- her down-tree instance is dead now, these last six decades, remember --- and I do not believe she merged cross-tree with anyone except perhaps Ashes Denote That Fire Was, who is building in themself a gestalt of the clade as best they can. No, I do not know anything so intimate.

What I do have, though, is a story. I have the story I learned from The Woman's Friend and Therapist and Cocladist and Lover, the one I learned from The Blue Fairy. I have all of that story that I learned, and I have that story that I lived.

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One day --- I remember it being quite a warm one, though every sim has different weather, and we as a clade are not all that keen on cold --- one day, The Woman came to me.

``Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars,'' she said as she stood before my door, looking much the same as I do --- though it bears repeating that she was \emph{quite} stylish, and I promise you, friends, I am \emph{not;} she wore a simple outfit of shifting colors that caught the eye without dazzling, one that made her look supremely comfortable as herself, and me? I wore a t-shirt and pajama pants! ``I was pointed your way by Praiseworthy. Do you have a moment to speak?''

Readers, I do not think I need to tell you that I was caught off-guard by this! I had never met The Woman before, though I had certainly seen her once or twice. There were functions, yes? And perhaps she came to one of my readings or two, and certainly she was there, that day on the field as we watched Michelle who was also Sasha give herself up to the world and become one with the heart that perhaps beats at some imagined center of the System. The most recent time I had seen her, though, was in some unreadable and thus unwritable mood as some few dozen of us gathered on the first of what some are now calling \emph{HaShichzur,} the day that Lagrange was restored after the Century Attack.

And now here she was, standing in the little courtyard created by the set of townhouses in which I and others within the ninth stanza live, with her paws clasped before her, bowing.

``Yes?'' I said. I do not know why I asked it like a question, but that is what I did.

``I would like to ask you about your writing.''

``Ah! Of course, my dear. Please, come in.'' I stood out of the way and gestured her inside, and this was the first time I saw her ritual of brushing her fingertips against the jamb of the door.

My place is clean and minimal. It is not clean because I am necessarily a clean person, nor is it minimal because I have any particular attachments to minimalism or its trappings. Friends, you have surely gathered by now that I am quite a bit more focused on writing than I am on most anything else. My home contains a simple kitchen and a simple dining table. There is a den in which there is a couch and a coffee table. There are two bedrooms, one of which contains a bed and the other of which is empty. The only room that is of any interest is perhaps my office, but even that is probably too minimal for most people's tastes! I have a desk. I have paper and pens and a keyboard on which I can type when that is the mood.

That is not to say that it is a boring place --- at least, I do not think so! I have some paintings on the wall, some landscapes interrupted by hyper-black squares painted by The Child. There are several little decorations scattered around, as well; little objects that The Oneirotect has made in its explorations in oneirotecture and oneiro-impressionism. The most meaningful of these sits on my writing desk, and takes the form of a wireframe polyhedral fox about the size of my paw. While it is silver in color, it does not cast any shadows on itself and has constant luminosity, and so it looks like a two-dimensional shape that changes as your perspective does.

Ah, I am digressing again. My thoughts and words wander.

The Woman came in, looked around, and smiled to me. It was a very kind smile, very earnest, and I have no other words but to say that I felt blessed by such a smile. ``Your home is so comfortable. It does not feel at all overwhelming.''

I nodded, feeling a wave of relief. ``I am pleased you think so! Can I get you anything?''

``I would not say no to a glass of water.''

While I fetched us both such a glass, I said, ``What is it that brings you here? I hope that Praiseworthy had nice things to say about me.''

``Quite nice, yes, though I find her a very curious skunk. She is elusive, perhaps? Not in that she is hard to find, but it is hard to pin down her mood or her thoughts.''

``Oh, very much so. I remember being her, yes, but that was nigh on three centuries ago, and I do not quite understand who she has become, myself.'' I handed over the glass of water and gestured toward the couch, where we sat on either end, half-facing each other.

``She was still pleasant to be around, at least,'' The Woman said. ``She said that I should seek you out, along with Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress, and Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps. You are the last on my list.''

``That is curious. What was the reasoning for those names?''

``A writer, a poet, and a musician. I have been having some thoughts on joy that I would like to explore with each of you.''

She told me her story, much as I have written it to you, readers. She spoke of the ways of seeking out joy, of diving into the pleasures of food --- and I can tell you, friends, she is absolutely correct about tam mak hoong; it is \emph{incredibly} delicious --- and the pleasures of touch and sensuality and sexuality. She told me of how much joy she had found in such things, and the rekindled relationship with Her Lover, and she also told me of how these joys were lovely, but not the joys that she was seeking, and that she had three more items on her list of five. She had entertainment, creativity, and spiritual fulfilment yet to go.

``So, your goal with visiting is to read?''

She shook her head. ``I have already read. That is why I was sent to visit Slow Hours. She is a very quiet person, and very comfortable to be around, as you are. You are inexact mirrors of each other, are you not? She reads and you write. She loves poetry most while you love prose. She is human and you are a skunk. She is a bit frumpy and tousled, and you are quite neat and put-together.''

I will admit, friends, that I looked down at my pajama pants and t-shirt and laughed. ``I do not feel put together.''

``Perhaps one never does,'' she said, ``and yet you exist so well contained. The whole of you exists within the person sitting before me. You are Rye, the author. You are Rye, the sincere. You are Rye who is kind. You are these things and you are none other.''

My readers will know well that I have too many words in me. Why, just look at all that I have written already! I have gone on at length about Laotian food and lovers and friends and family and mochas and melancholy. I have accused myself already a handful of times of intruding on my own story, of being helpless before the graphomania that guides my paw. So it is that you must believe me when I say that I was left speechless. All of this ceaseless torrent of words within me simply stopped.

I do not know if you have ever been complimented in just the right way by just the right person, but if you have, you well know that it is startling in its intensity. Had someone else said these things about me, even my beloved up-trees, I might well have blushed and stammered a thank you and felt good for the rest of the day.

The Woman, this skunk who sat before me with a glass of water held in her paws and her very chic outfit, the one who had smiled to me with such earnestness as to be a blessing, this woman who was too much herself, had just perceived me with such force as to leave me feeling bowled over. Even today, even these many years later, I remember that compliment and find breath catching in my throat, and we have already spoken on that, have we not?

We sat in silence, then, while I processed this. My friends, you may perhaps have picked up the sense that The Woman is in some fundamental way broken and perhaps unable to interact well with others. After all, she sits for so long in her room and in her home and on her field, and she sees Her Friend only with some frequency, and had only just recently gotten in touch with Her Lover, yes? And that is in many ways true. But it is not \emph{wholly} true. She was too much herself, yes, and she would have said even then that she had lived for too long and that she was in some fundamental way broken, but she was also so much more! I have shown you all that she was through her own perception, but from the outside\ldots ah, she was hard not to love, my friends.

``Thank you, my dear,'' I said at last, bowing.

She smiled --- another blessing! --- and nodded to me.

``Tell me about your reading, then.''

``I visited Slow Hours in her library,'' she began. ``I know that it belongs to the whole of Au Lieu Du Rêve, but she has inhabited it quite thoroughly, has she not?''

``She has, at that,'' I said.

``We sat in the solarium and spoke about what reading \emph{is.} She spoke of taking a story or a poem and wrapping oneself up in it. She gave me an example. She recited a poem:

\{\{\% verse \%\}\} Too many suits move in too many lines. They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed, hunting crudites, canapés, bruschetta. Fingers ferry food --- fish, perhaps --- finding slack-jawed mouths already open, squawking at wayward children or bemoaning The Market, whatever that may be. At some point, who cares how long ago, death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again. Who knows how well they knew him, their backs turned, studiously deciding that he is no longer of them? One could never guess. We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps, that the room is tastefully furnished, the casket silver, the bar, open, quite good, and none of them are drunk yet, or at least none look it. ``Good man, good man,'' they mutter, doing all they can to convince each other through well-rehearsed performances, that this must be the case. The silently bereaved already sit graveside.'' \{\{\% /verse \%\}\}

I turned those words over and over in my head for a minute, since The Woman had seemed quite comfortable sitting in silence with me. She used that time to drink her water while I played back the words again and again, looking down at my paws, and then returned my gaze to hers. ``There is a difference between the performance of grief and grieving, is there not?''

``It is as you say. There is performed grief and performative grief. We of the tenth stanza were quite sad when Lagrange came back with us but not Should We Forget. We received condolences from many, some flowers and many kind words. Ever Dream came over and spoke with me about grief as we sat out on the field, where she said,''It is quite sad, is it not? To lose someone you have known for so long is quite sad.'' I agreed, and then drew a line around the topic.'' She performed such a motion now, describing an arc before her with one of her well kept claws, before dismissing it with a wave. ``This was grief performed.''

I nodded, and in my heart, I think I knew what was coming next, for I found my muscles bunching up as in in preparation for something --- flight, perhaps? I do not know, my friends.

``And Warmth In Fire came over, too, so that it could sit at our table and weep rather than eat. Ey wept, and then asked to retreat, and we guided her up to Should We Forget's room so that they could lay in her bed for a while in silence. When it came back downstairs, ey thanked us kindly and left, and when we went back upstairs to look, there was a flower wrought out of some subtly glowing metal left on Should We Forget's pillow. It lays there still.''

``I remember that day,'' I said. ``I will admit that I only met Should We Forget a handful of times, and always mediated through Warmth, so I do not have the context for that grief, other than the fact that ey was left in pain for some time after the restoration.''

``That was performative grief,'' The Woman said. ``That was grief that, through its expression, was made real. Warmth In Fire's grieving allowed us to grieve as well. Ever Dream and all of those who sent us flowers performed a grief that was only intellectual. I appreciate them for that, but I love Warmth In Fire for what ey gave us.''

We as a clade cry easily, and it is a thing that we all like about ourselves. I like the fact that I can cry! I like that I can cry over my own writing, go back and read a scene I wrote wherein a character experiences too many feelings or some form of growth and cry along with them.

So it is perhaps no surprise that I cried then, and that, for the third time, The Woman sat with me in silence.

When I was once more able to speak, after I had taken a moment to clean up, I asked, ``You went into this experience with Slow Hours to explore joy, yes? What did you find, in the end?''

``I did not read only this one poem. I read several more with her that day, and took home several books to read in such a way. Slow Hours talked me through the joy of stories --- even the small ones --- and left me with some assignments.

``I did not like all of the books, but Slow Hours instructed me to read them anyway, unless they started to make me truly bored. None did, however, so I finished every book I took with me.

``Of the five books I brought home, one made me quite upset for how viscerally uncaring the protagonist was. I found them acting for reasons that I did not understand, as though they were a being solely of habits and not of thoughts or emotions. One made me cry for the way the protagonist was torn down and yet built herself into someone new. The other three books I found quite enjoyable, and they were all engrossing to greater or lesser extent.

``I found this form of reading to be fulfilling, yes, but also all-encompassing. When I read in the manner that Slow Hours suggests, by wrapping myself up in the story and letting it play out in my head, I found that I became more easily engrossed, yes, but also I found myself wrung out at the end of each. I would finish a book and then have to lay in bed for ten hours straight, sleeping off and on. When I brought this up with Slow Hours, she only smiled, shrugged, and said that appreciation takes as much energy as creation.

``There \emph{was} joy there, though. It has been many, many years since I had read something so thoroughly, had so completely taken it within myself. It was nothing so trite as feeling as though I was living there with the characters, nor that I was unable to put the book down. It was a relishing. It was a savoring. Each word became a part of my world, drifting into view to be cherished and then back out of it. By the third book, I saw what it was that Slow Hours meant by wrapping oneself up in a story, and I found comfort in this.''

I stayed silent as I listened. After all, to hear so intriguing a person speak so eloquently on the act of reading was lovely! I never learned whether any of the books that she read were mine, and I was too afraid to ask. I do not know why, friends, but I was feeling quite outclassed. The Woman had a quiet force to her personality that I cannot deny, and I wonder to this day whether she knew this about herself.

``You do not seem too pleased with this as an outcome,'' I said.

She shrugged. ``It was a step on a path. I have also sought out entertainment in other forms. I spoke next with Beholden, who provided me a similar approach to listening to music. We spoke about active listening and what it means to actually hear a song, to, yes, wrap oneself up in it. We spoke about songs and albums, movements and pieces, and the stories that each of them can tell. Did you know that our dear Beholden has recently completed a concept album about the Century Attack? I did not listen to this for her assignments, per her request, but I did after the fact.

``I ran into a similar sensation, however. I \emph{did} find joy in this type of listening, as I prowled through--'' At this, the woman's form rolled over in a wave and, with a quiet sigh, she was no longer a skunk, but instead a panther, black and with shining fur. She readjusted her clothing and continued. ``As I prowled through the music that Beholden suggested, I found a depth to the act that I had never before experienced. I was able to wrap myself up in sound and lose myself within it. Even with the music that I did not particularly like, I was able to find appreciation and tease out organization.

``Beholden's concept album, when I listened to it thus, left me in tears.'' She laughed quietly, and I felt comforted that I was present to hear such. ``This is perhaps obvious, yes? A concept album surrounding the Century Attack, where we lost so many of our very own?

``There were no lyrics to this album, though, so it was not the words that made me cry. I was not listening to words, but I \emph{was} listening to voices. I was listening to the voices of her up-tree, Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres, and her partner's up tree, A Finger Curled. She had delved into her sample library and pulled together all of the clips that she had recorded of those two and built about an hour's worth of music out of them. A Finger Curled, who was lost in the Attack, and Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres, who quit out of despair one week later. It was her threnody. It was her wailing song.''

Readers, I am not ashamed to say that I cried again. How could I not, after all? I had met Beckoning and Muse, before, myself. They had invited me over some few years before the Century Attack to let me research their gardens. They had fed me a dinner of pasta with zucchini, and a desert of zucchini bread, for their harvest was too large by far. We had sat out on the deck and looked out over the grass and the little raised beds that Beckoning had tended for a century or more and, although my paws itched to return home to write, we spoke until long after the sunset on our joys and sorrows, our hopes and fears.

I cried, and through it all, The Woman sat in kind silence.

When, now for the second time, I was able to sit up straight again, able breath slowly, able to look at The Woman instead of my paws as I covered my face, I bowed to her and said, ``Thank you for telling me these things. I did not realize just how much I needed to hear them.''

``Why?''

The Woman's simple question left me all the room in the world to admit that I did not know. I think that until she asked it, I was not quite sure why, myself. I \emph{had} needed to hear those things but, yes: why? I do not think I would have been able to tell her as part of my statement, but that syllable forced my thoughts into order in a way that they are not as I write this, six years later.

``Because I have not internalized the immediacy of the attack,'' I said. ``I did not know Should We Forget. I never met No Longer Myself. I met and spoke with Beckoning and Muse, yes, but only once. You telling me these things --- me hearing them --- was enough to make me realize that I have not truly grieved them, not properly. Your story of Warmth grieving helped me understand em better, and your story of Beholden's music and how she told you not to listen to it for her assignments made me realize that I, too, am only just starting to process the loss.''

``I understand. I was forced to confront the immediacy of Should We Forget no longer being with us from the very first day, and I am used to thinking of my stanza in terms of loss. We lost Death Itself and I Do Not Know, yes? We knew loss in a way more immediate within the clade except perhaps by those of the second stanza, who lost their first line, too, yes?''

``Was there a difference for you? Death Itself and I Do Not Know quit, but Should We Forget was taken from you.''

The Woman tilted her head, then gazed out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. ``I think I knew, on some level, that Death Itself would leave us. I certainly suspected when she went all but catatonic, yes? But I knew. I had no such foreknowledge of Should We Forget leaving us. I suspect that none did, except perhaps Slow Hours, and she told me that her dreams did not make sense until after the fact.'' She returned her gaze to me. ``So yes. There was a difference. The feeling surrounding Death Itself and I Do Not Know is a tired acceptance. They \emph{were} a tired acceptance even immediately after. The feeling surrounding Should We Forget is a sharp and cold grief. It is a feeling of my world being upended and my footing no longer being sure.''

``It did not feel stable after Lagrange came back, no.''

``It did not. That, I am told, is why Beholden wrote her threnody: Beckoning was lost to the Attack and Muse quit out of grief one week later. Beholden, fearing that her life was unstable, declined the merge. She told me that she feared that accepting it would change who she was on a fundamental level, only for her to die, not loving her partner in the same way that she had for hundreds of years beforehand. A Finger Pointing has Beckoning's memories, but Muse is truly dead, now. Her memories have been dismissed and cannot be retrieved.''

``I see,'' I said. ``And so she memorialized what memories she did have in the form of her samples.''

``There are many memorials now, are there not? There are many tokens. There are many metallic flowers and songs of laughter.''

I smiled. ``There is poetry in your words, my dear.''

She bowed from where she sat, smiling. ``And so I come to you, Rye.''

``So you do. You have read with Slow Hours. What shall we do to help you on your path to joy?''

``Write.''

I laughed. I do not think it was an unkind laugh, but it was a startled one. I am a writer, yes, but I do not fancy myself much of a teacher. I do not think I am much of a collaborator, either. I get quite protective of my work, and I can be something of a bitch when it comes to having it challenged. ``How shall we write, then?'' I asked. ``I write with A Finger Pointing. We send each other letters back and forth, telling stories.''

``Perhaps that is a thing we can do, too, but this is a project that I would like to approach as a conversation. I do not have an agenda for how, simply that I must.''

``Have you written before?''

She shook her head. ``No, I have not. I have not created much since becoming who I am, I am sorry to say. My stanza will occasionally tell each other stories, however, and I always fancied myself quite good at that.''

I nodded. ``A story is a good place to start, yes. You really have made so little?''

``My last century has been spent focusing inwards and meting my time out carefully for reasons I cannot explain. I have been seeking a form of stillness, perhaps.''

Ah! This was it! My friends, this was the point when I realized just what it was that made each of The Woman's smiles feel like blessings and what made it feel like she bore some power within her that I could not quite understand. It was her \emph{stillness.} My astute readers will remember that she had a thought, some few thousand words ago: perhaps this unbecoming that her mind circled around was simply the utmost in stillness.

Now, your narrator did not know this at the time --- I do not even know now that this was the thought she had that day, but I am a storyteller, and so that is part of her story --- but at the time, it was a revelation. Stillness and stillness and stillness. What a dream to have! Would that I could find such, yes? Even now, even as I write this, I feel that the lucidity in my words is due only to my recounting of a conversation I actually had, words anchored to moments in time that I pull out one right after the other and lay in a pretty row.

At the time, however, I said, ``Have you found stillness in your endeavors so far? Was there stillness in active reading and active listening?''

``Not at all, no. I do not speak of physical stillness, but stillness of spirit. I shift forms, yes? I came to you as a skunk, yes? That is a physical restlessness that is evidence of an inner restlessness. My thoughts are unsettled. My feelings are unsettled. My mind is turbulent.''

``That being the reason you did not feel the joy that you wanted?''

She nodded. ``Yes. My thoughts became ordered, perhaps. That turbulence became a purposeful movement; rather than a stormy ocean, they were a river.''

``I am sorry to say that I do not think my books would be any different.''

``Oh, they are not,'' she said, chuckling. ``They are quite good, of course, but they are hardly meditative.''

I laughed as well. ``Thank you, I think. I have a few that are labeled `meditations on whatever', but even those probably do not fit the bill.''

``I would assume not. No, I came to you because I wanted to talk to you about creating specifically because I watched And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights paint while visiting Beholden.''

``Ah! Motes! What a delight!''

``She is, yes, though she is also quite a lot, is she not?''

I laughed, nodding.

``I will admit that, although I would agree that she is a delight. She was perhaps too much for me. When I first arrived at my visit to the house on the hill, she had just been swimming and was running around here and there.''

``How old was she that day?''

``She said that she was seven,'' The Woman said. ``I found her joy to be quite different from what I imagine for myself, though, as ought to be the case for someone who has chosen to live as a seven year old versus someone who has perhaps no choice but to love as a 317 year old, yes?''

``I will say that she is no less flighty or energetic when she chooses to live at older ages. When she is, say, twenty five, there is still no stopping her.''

``So I am told. However, she is also a very good girl, is she not? Beholden saw the state that I was in --- for when Motes started zipping around the house, I started shifting between forms --- and suggested that she go and paint. She said quite simply''Okay!'' and ran off to the next room where she simply sat on a stool and began painting.''

I nodded up to the wall beside the couch, upon which a painting sat. The Woman smiled and nodded.

The painting was of my up-tree's house. The Instance Artist was one who decided that it had had quite enough of life in comfort, life here on Lagrange, life here honing, or perhaps forging new frontiers but in a familiar place, and up and left for the stars, back when humanity buckled down and decided to send out the two launch vehicles. Our very own twins, yes? Castor and Pollux? Those two half-sized Systems that even still race out of the Solar System at some unimaginable speed, yes? The Instance Artist left us all behind with no fork to spare, and broke all of our hearts.

When it had lived here on Lagrange, it had contracted my other up-tree, The Sim Designer, to build for it an infinite short-grass prairie. It was a land of long, rolling hills and yet longer flat basins that always drank most thirstily from the seasonal storms that did their best to thrash the earth below. There, amid the countless acres, sat its house, low and flat, an echo of the plains around it all done up in concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of the grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass.

And so there on my wall sat a painting that I had asked The Child to make, small by her standards at only the size of both of my paws held flat, wherein she had painted the house, the endless prairie, and the sky that somehow managed to be something beyond endless. There was the gray of the concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass. There was the plain, the sky.

And there, right in the center, hovering a scant claw-width above the house, a perfectly black perfect square.

Readers, you must understand that, when I say perfectly black, I do mean it! There is this color, or non-color, \emph{Eigengrau} that is perhaps the darkest you are used to seeing. If you are in a perfectly dark room, or you are out beneath the stars at night and you close your eyes, or you are hiding under two layers of blankets from the monsters that haunt us still, even in this afterlife that we have built up into our nigh-perfection, what you see is not pure black, but \emph{Eigengrau.} It is the darkest color, I am told, that our eyes can see, phys-side! This is because, even when there is no light, the nerves of our eyes still fire occasionally. Perhaps it is because this is something that is required for nerve cells to feel healthy, and when those cells are in our muscles and it is just one or two at a time, it does not yank our hand away from our pen and paper like they were burning hot, but when they are in our eyes, every little firing is still perceived as a photon hitting this rod or that cone. Perhaps it is because there is some fundamental state of being for us that is \emph{not} stillness, that is movement at some molecular level. Perhaps it is simply because they are lonely! I do not know, I do not know. I do not know.

This square is not \emph{Eigengrau.} It is beyond that. It is beyond even black! It is deeper than \emph{Eigengrau,} yes, but it is also a very thirsty black. If the ground of The Instance Artist's prairie drinks thirstily of the sky, so too does this black drink thirstily of all the light in the world. It draws light from the room, and when you look at the painting, the world seems dimmer. It is a hole in the world.

I am used to it, my friends, for it sits happily enough upon my wall, but I am told that it is unnerving to see.

``Her paintings have always struck me as bearing a sort of serenity that I have not actually seen in the world,'' I said after we had appreciated house and plain and sky and hole in the world. ``It is more than just some moment of movement captured and frozen in time. It is like she records things that were never still to begin with.''

``Yes, and that is what drew me to her,'' The Woman said, gaze lingering on the painting. ``I begged Beholden's leave to sit and watch Motes for nearly an hour. I claimed a spot in her studio once I received permission and watched as she worked. While I was there, she built up a scene of a mesa. I recognized it as Table Mountain. Do you remember?''

``Yes,'' I said, with some surprise. ``I have not thought of that place in\ldots well, likely not since we uploaded!''

She laughed. ``Neither had I. We hiked there once and it seems to have left little enough impression, and Motes simply pulled it up from some deep recess, yes? Seeing that slowly take shape, though, as she worked with her paints, I felt like I was seeing some ancient behemoth who had never once woken laying asleep. It was a mountain that had never moved and never changed, even as a suburb sprawled at its base.''

``Did she paint the shape while you were there?'' I said, gesturing to the black-beyond-black square.

``No, not while I was looking. I did still have my errand, yes? I did not want to lose track of that. I wish now that I had.''

``Having watched her paint this one, I can tell you that it is both more and less important than the rest of the painting. She paints it much as she paints the rest of the painting, yes? She brings one foot up onto her stool so that she can rest her chin on it and her tail drapes down behind her and she listens to her very strange music, and she paints the rectangle. Perhaps she sticks her tongue tip out as she does so, like she is concentrating very hard, yes?'' I stuck my tongue tip out just so, furrowing my brow and squinting as though at some minute detail.

The woman laughed.

``So it is much like she paints the rest of the scene, yes? Except that it is not, because she is not adding to the picture, she is taking away from it. I have tried to look at this painting from every angle, yes? I have looked up close and far away. I have touched it and smelled it and --- yes, I will admit --- tasted it, and it is in all ways just paint on canvas. But it is not on \emph{top} of \emph{anything,} it is \emph{through everything,} I would say. I do not know how else to explain it. With all the calmness in the universe, she excised a part of the world from existence.'' I looked up to the painting again. ``I feel that, were I able to visit Dear's prairie again, that very chunk of it would be missing. I fear it would be some sort of black hole hungrily gobbling up all of Lagrange from the inside. In my dreams, that is what the Century Attack looks like. In my dreams, we are all pulled through a null rectangle like that, and when the world is pulled back out, those like Should We Forget and No Longer Myself and Beckoning and Muse are left within.''

We sat in silence --- silences can be so comfortable sometimes! --- while I looked up at the painting and The Woman looked out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. It must have been two or three minutes of just long, comfortable silence, of just a woman who was also a cat and a woman who was also a skunk, two women who were in some roundabout way the same, sitting together.

``How large do you suppose it would be?'' The Woman said, startling me out of my reverie.

``Mm? The rectangle? The hole?''

She nodded.

``I go back and forth. Sometimes, I feel that it is right in front of me and the house is in the distance, and that it is painted to scale. Sometimes, I feel like it must be behind the house, or way out beyond the sky, and it is larger than the moon.''

``I see we understand it in the same way. I cannot tell, either. I can tell you, though, that watching Motes brought me the closest to the joy that I have been seeking that I have ever been.'' She frowned down to her glass, now empty. When she continued, her speech was halting, slow, thoughtful. ``Not\ldots for me, not my own joy, and I think not even for her, though the little skunk certainly seems quite joyful. It is\ldots adjacent to the joy. It brought me near to the joy, but did not necessarily bring the joy to me.''

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We talked for some time more, The Woman and I, and discussed what it was that we could do to help her find joy. I am sorry to say, though, that we were not quite able to come up with something.

We circled for some time around meditative acts and how that might work with writing. Automatic writing, perhaps? Should The Woman set up with a note book and a pen and look into some deeper self and begin to write? Should she bid my demon of graphomania visit her, grab her by the wrist, drag her pen across the page that words may flow after it like eager puppies?

No, no. That was not it.

Should she journal? Should she write what she felt during the day? Should she boil the ceaseless moments of her life down to vignettes? Should she make those around her into caricatures that only showed those bits worthy of being set to paper?

No, no. That was not it, either.

Friends, I will note that, even though I got a little bit frustrated with myself, these \emph{were} good discussions. I was frustrated with myself because I wanted to help in this endeavor. It was a good idea! It was a good task. I wanted to help but I was not able to succeed, not that day.

So it was that The Woman returned home with the promise to come back the next day after we had both slept on it.
