Post by Tallaith on Jun 27, 2010 20:15:54 GMT -5
A letter of sorts, bound in a plain leather cover, has been left in the Kinship's house on the small desk in the room generally used by Iscro. It's written in a very neat hand, the lines small and precisely spaced, and there are no errors or corrections to be seen. It reads as follows...
I wish I could say the words in my mind out loud, bring them to my lips in the instant that I command them. It's so much easier to bring words out of the depths when I'm only putting them to paper; the immense pressure of knowing someone's actions or thoughts or emotions are weighing so heavily on what I say makes me as mute as forgetting.
So many words, and I can only recall a few when I'm speaking to others. Words like "tomorrow," "perhaps," and "lonely" are very familiar to me! But I can't always fish them from the deep pools of forgotten time. "Lonely..." Losing this one is especially odd to me, since it is precisely how I should describe my life.
Lonely.
When you think of loneliness, it's likely in the form of a contrast. When you have friends or your family nearby, you aren't lonely; it's only in their absence that you're able to put a name on that long ache you get when you realize you can't just turn around, right that instant, and to speak to someone you love. Lonely is the name of hoping you won't always be alone, but knowing that in the meantime you have to suffer, celebrate, love, despise, live, and die by yourself. Loneliness can last a few moments, less than the span of a inhaled-exhaled-sleeping breath. Or it can last for years upon years. I have even heard folks say they're lonely even when surrounded by people, but that's nothing to do with my story. I'll just talk about my definition of lonely.
Imagine the longest, loneliest time of your life. No one is near enough to hear you call, even if you scream as loud as you're able. There's no postman coming to the door to drop off a note and share a half-dozen words of pleasant chatter. There is only you. A small stone house. Scores and scores and scores of acres of empty, ancient forest sleeping under a slow moon. There is a slender silver river near your house. Boughs of the fruit trees nearly bend to the grass outside your bedchamber's window. There are animals, deer and foxes and hares and birds by the dozen. But no other people. There is only you. Only you.
Now that you have this picture in your mind, try to imagine what you would do with yourself if this was your house, in the middle of a forest as old as time's passing and rich with all the glory of a cathedral made of gilded mallorn trees and emerald moss and ivory stone. In this house, remember, you live alone. There are three rooms: a common room, your bedchamber, and the room that was once your mother's. You have a shelf of already-ancient books, twenty-one of them to be precise, and two chairs and a table in the common room. There are also the tools of everyday life, pots and kettles and cups and cutlery, all placed neatly in their niches near the hearth. Your chamber has your own narrow bed, draped with silks and leather and velvet, and your mother's room is a shrine to her. You do not go there often, and eventually never, and after the passing of many years, you don't even see the closed door any more. What lays beyond, in the trapped space that was once hers, is forgotten given enough time.
Try to fathom what you would do to pass the time if you were alone in this house for perhaps one week.
After a week's passing, perhaps the rooms seem quite small, or dingy and in need of a good scrub. The old cracked stone near the doorway, the second one over from the jamb, starts making your mind itch every time you glance at it. Other tiny things, like the way the birds trill and hum to one another to pass along the morning's news, start grinding your senses. They're not alone, because they have dozens, perhaps hundreds of other birds to keep them company. And they have so much to do, visiting with each other and making nests, hunting worms, all the busy business of birds.
All you have is a house, twenty-one books that by now you've likely at least skimmed through, and the tiny clutter of everyday existence.
After two weeks of this, you've memorized where each apple tree is located in direct relevance to the back stoop of the house. You're becoming familiar with the apples, even, because you look at them each morning as you pick the ripest ones for your breakfast. Apples are one of the greatest blessings of Yavanna. Even if you have no bodily need of food, if you've been told all your life that you DO need to eat at least once or twice a day, you will force yourself to eat these apples. After enough breakfasts, lunches, and suppers of slightly tart, dry apples you will rue that Yavanna ever bore the fruit from her song.
Perhaps a month after your isolation started, you might find yourself talking to things that don't talk back; your bed-post, the pail for water from the slender, sinuous river at the bottom of your yard, the archaic squirrel that creaks past the wood-pile every morning just as the mists rise from the grass in the dawn light. These are your only companions, and every time you open your mouth to speak to them and your tongue creaks with rust, you know that you're mad for two reasons. The first is that you're trying to converse with no possible chance of the give-and-take of normal discussion. The second reason you're losing your wits is so much worse; it's because you have hope that by clinging to your use of words, someday you may have an occasion to use them again.
After a month of being so alone, the chances that you'll have company again have started declining.
After a year of solitude, if someone hasn't found your house or seen some sign of your life in this endless stretch of golden trees, there's almost no chance anyone ever will.
Can you imagine spending a year in such a way? I think anyone would at some point decide to simply walk away. A life spent alone is pale and merely suffering, rather than living; anyone would eventually put what they can carry into a sack, find the stoutest branch they can for a walking-stick, and chance death from the unknown world rather than promise death from the sickness of sameness.
It took me almost six hundred years to walk away from my home. This is what lonely means to me.
My mother left one day, saying she was going to the city to find a cure... a cure for silver hair, for her bent and wicked back. I didn't remember her growing so faded or exactly when even breathing started causing her pain. Pain, weariness, hunger, all of these were sensations I did not fully understand, though through my mother I experienced them in my own way. Now I know that my mother was of Man, and I am an Elf. Of course I never really understood the failings of the Second-Born.
Before I left home I never knew there were such differences in people. Looking back on my time with my mother, I can recall only half a dozen visitors in our house and I can't place a single one of them in a particular race. I don't know who my real parents are, though now I understand that my mother must have been a certain breed of Man called Dunedain to have lived as long as she did when she finally failed.
I'll also never know if she reached the city she spoke of, since I have never found anyone who knew her.
When my mother left me, I was almost three hundred years old. I was, and still am, a child in many ways, though I suppose if my mother had allowed it, I would have been a well-grown lass by then. She kept me as a child through actions and words; she warned me constantly of the world outside our little clearing, about bad people that I should always, ALWAYS watch over my shoulder for. Even though I didn't understand her, my mother was the only person in my life and her word was infallible. Safety was at home, and the bad people of the world walked the roads beyond the forest.
"Valisilwyn, wait for me here. Wait for me. I will be back."
Those were the last words I heard from any living person for six hundred years. I did as my mother asked. I waited. I went mad. My house started falling down around me and I didn't have the knowledge or the tools to repair it. I made countless roofs to replace the one that collapsed one wet spring with pine boughs. My clothes, my linens, everything eventually rotted away. If the weather had not been so mild, since I imagined myself having the same weakness for cold and heat, food and drink, rest and exhaustion, that humans do, I suppose I would have taken "sick" and would still be sitting in my rotten, ruined house waiting for death. The fruit trees behind the house died and their saplings took their place. Four times, in all; four generations of apple trees came and went while I waited for my mother.
Did I say I went mad?
I suppose I did, now that I read this strange tale again.
Madness, though, is not always a bitter thing. For instance, I am a quite cheerful person. I am always overjoyed to see people I know now, after a bit of adjustment. I am an unfailing optimist. I see the dawn in every darkness, the new start in every failure. I blame this on my isolation, and I blame my lack of concern regarding my outlook on my isolation. I have no shame in assigning blame on others, or myself.
I still am mad. I perhaps should have started this writing with that statement. I don't talk to the voices in my head, as they all left within perhaps six months of me leaving my home. I don't think I'm someone I'm not. I'm simply Valisilwyn, though there have been many times I wished I was a bird or a trout so I could have had other birds and trouts to talk to. My madness is due to my lack of reasonable understanding of folks around me. If someone causes me too much happiness, too much sadness, too much anxiety or bliss... I lose my mind.
I don't remember if this happened so much when I was at home alone. I had no reason to try to mark such instances when I was the only person I had to answer to. Though I do recall having this... madness in a more diluted form when my mother was still alive.
I get angry. I can't help myself. I'm not sure how else to describe it; even though I'm quite witty and even capable of writing down my thoughts, regarding this even my quill goes silent.
I get angry.
I suppose in comparison to many other flavors of insanity, this is not so bad. I hope to learn to control it, but understand I can never entirely be rid of my temper. It's as much a part of me as loneliness or my blue eyes.
My introduction to the grand world is only just beginning. I suppose that those who read this, then meet me, will think someone else wrote this as some sort of jest. If I can manage to get more than half a dozen of the simplest words out of my mouth at a time I feel like I'm having a wonderful conversation. I've been told I'm deaf, mute, and simple. I've been tricked many times and I guess people will keep tricking me.
I miss home very badly. But I don't miss being lonely, and now I don't miss being silent.
~ Valisilwyn Dinenlhathron
I wish I could say the words in my mind out loud, bring them to my lips in the instant that I command them. It's so much easier to bring words out of the depths when I'm only putting them to paper; the immense pressure of knowing someone's actions or thoughts or emotions are weighing so heavily on what I say makes me as mute as forgetting.
So many words, and I can only recall a few when I'm speaking to others. Words like "tomorrow," "perhaps," and "lonely" are very familiar to me! But I can't always fish them from the deep pools of forgotten time. "Lonely..." Losing this one is especially odd to me, since it is precisely how I should describe my life.
Lonely.
When you think of loneliness, it's likely in the form of a contrast. When you have friends or your family nearby, you aren't lonely; it's only in their absence that you're able to put a name on that long ache you get when you realize you can't just turn around, right that instant, and to speak to someone you love. Lonely is the name of hoping you won't always be alone, but knowing that in the meantime you have to suffer, celebrate, love, despise, live, and die by yourself. Loneliness can last a few moments, less than the span of a inhaled-exhaled-sleeping breath. Or it can last for years upon years. I have even heard folks say they're lonely even when surrounded by people, but that's nothing to do with my story. I'll just talk about my definition of lonely.
Imagine the longest, loneliest time of your life. No one is near enough to hear you call, even if you scream as loud as you're able. There's no postman coming to the door to drop off a note and share a half-dozen words of pleasant chatter. There is only you. A small stone house. Scores and scores and scores of acres of empty, ancient forest sleeping under a slow moon. There is a slender silver river near your house. Boughs of the fruit trees nearly bend to the grass outside your bedchamber's window. There are animals, deer and foxes and hares and birds by the dozen. But no other people. There is only you. Only you.
Now that you have this picture in your mind, try to imagine what you would do with yourself if this was your house, in the middle of a forest as old as time's passing and rich with all the glory of a cathedral made of gilded mallorn trees and emerald moss and ivory stone. In this house, remember, you live alone. There are three rooms: a common room, your bedchamber, and the room that was once your mother's. You have a shelf of already-ancient books, twenty-one of them to be precise, and two chairs and a table in the common room. There are also the tools of everyday life, pots and kettles and cups and cutlery, all placed neatly in their niches near the hearth. Your chamber has your own narrow bed, draped with silks and leather and velvet, and your mother's room is a shrine to her. You do not go there often, and eventually never, and after the passing of many years, you don't even see the closed door any more. What lays beyond, in the trapped space that was once hers, is forgotten given enough time.
Try to fathom what you would do to pass the time if you were alone in this house for perhaps one week.
After a week's passing, perhaps the rooms seem quite small, or dingy and in need of a good scrub. The old cracked stone near the doorway, the second one over from the jamb, starts making your mind itch every time you glance at it. Other tiny things, like the way the birds trill and hum to one another to pass along the morning's news, start grinding your senses. They're not alone, because they have dozens, perhaps hundreds of other birds to keep them company. And they have so much to do, visiting with each other and making nests, hunting worms, all the busy business of birds.
All you have is a house, twenty-one books that by now you've likely at least skimmed through, and the tiny clutter of everyday existence.
After two weeks of this, you've memorized where each apple tree is located in direct relevance to the back stoop of the house. You're becoming familiar with the apples, even, because you look at them each morning as you pick the ripest ones for your breakfast. Apples are one of the greatest blessings of Yavanna. Even if you have no bodily need of food, if you've been told all your life that you DO need to eat at least once or twice a day, you will force yourself to eat these apples. After enough breakfasts, lunches, and suppers of slightly tart, dry apples you will rue that Yavanna ever bore the fruit from her song.
Perhaps a month after your isolation started, you might find yourself talking to things that don't talk back; your bed-post, the pail for water from the slender, sinuous river at the bottom of your yard, the archaic squirrel that creaks past the wood-pile every morning just as the mists rise from the grass in the dawn light. These are your only companions, and every time you open your mouth to speak to them and your tongue creaks with rust, you know that you're mad for two reasons. The first is that you're trying to converse with no possible chance of the give-and-take of normal discussion. The second reason you're losing your wits is so much worse; it's because you have hope that by clinging to your use of words, someday you may have an occasion to use them again.
After a month of being so alone, the chances that you'll have company again have started declining.
After a year of solitude, if someone hasn't found your house or seen some sign of your life in this endless stretch of golden trees, there's almost no chance anyone ever will.
Can you imagine spending a year in such a way? I think anyone would at some point decide to simply walk away. A life spent alone is pale and merely suffering, rather than living; anyone would eventually put what they can carry into a sack, find the stoutest branch they can for a walking-stick, and chance death from the unknown world rather than promise death from the sickness of sameness.
It took me almost six hundred years to walk away from my home. This is what lonely means to me.
My mother left one day, saying she was going to the city to find a cure... a cure for silver hair, for her bent and wicked back. I didn't remember her growing so faded or exactly when even breathing started causing her pain. Pain, weariness, hunger, all of these were sensations I did not fully understand, though through my mother I experienced them in my own way. Now I know that my mother was of Man, and I am an Elf. Of course I never really understood the failings of the Second-Born.
Before I left home I never knew there were such differences in people. Looking back on my time with my mother, I can recall only half a dozen visitors in our house and I can't place a single one of them in a particular race. I don't know who my real parents are, though now I understand that my mother must have been a certain breed of Man called Dunedain to have lived as long as she did when she finally failed.
I'll also never know if she reached the city she spoke of, since I have never found anyone who knew her.
When my mother left me, I was almost three hundred years old. I was, and still am, a child in many ways, though I suppose if my mother had allowed it, I would have been a well-grown lass by then. She kept me as a child through actions and words; she warned me constantly of the world outside our little clearing, about bad people that I should always, ALWAYS watch over my shoulder for. Even though I didn't understand her, my mother was the only person in my life and her word was infallible. Safety was at home, and the bad people of the world walked the roads beyond the forest.
"Valisilwyn, wait for me here. Wait for me. I will be back."
Those were the last words I heard from any living person for six hundred years. I did as my mother asked. I waited. I went mad. My house started falling down around me and I didn't have the knowledge or the tools to repair it. I made countless roofs to replace the one that collapsed one wet spring with pine boughs. My clothes, my linens, everything eventually rotted away. If the weather had not been so mild, since I imagined myself having the same weakness for cold and heat, food and drink, rest and exhaustion, that humans do, I suppose I would have taken "sick" and would still be sitting in my rotten, ruined house waiting for death. The fruit trees behind the house died and their saplings took their place. Four times, in all; four generations of apple trees came and went while I waited for my mother.
Did I say I went mad?
I suppose I did, now that I read this strange tale again.
Madness, though, is not always a bitter thing. For instance, I am a quite cheerful person. I am always overjoyed to see people I know now, after a bit of adjustment. I am an unfailing optimist. I see the dawn in every darkness, the new start in every failure. I blame this on my isolation, and I blame my lack of concern regarding my outlook on my isolation. I have no shame in assigning blame on others, or myself.
I still am mad. I perhaps should have started this writing with that statement. I don't talk to the voices in my head, as they all left within perhaps six months of me leaving my home. I don't think I'm someone I'm not. I'm simply Valisilwyn, though there have been many times I wished I was a bird or a trout so I could have had other birds and trouts to talk to. My madness is due to my lack of reasonable understanding of folks around me. If someone causes me too much happiness, too much sadness, too much anxiety or bliss... I lose my mind.
I don't remember if this happened so much when I was at home alone. I had no reason to try to mark such instances when I was the only person I had to answer to. Though I do recall having this... madness in a more diluted form when my mother was still alive.
I get angry. I can't help myself. I'm not sure how else to describe it; even though I'm quite witty and even capable of writing down my thoughts, regarding this even my quill goes silent.
I get angry.
I suppose in comparison to many other flavors of insanity, this is not so bad. I hope to learn to control it, but understand I can never entirely be rid of my temper. It's as much a part of me as loneliness or my blue eyes.
My introduction to the grand world is only just beginning. I suppose that those who read this, then meet me, will think someone else wrote this as some sort of jest. If I can manage to get more than half a dozen of the simplest words out of my mouth at a time I feel like I'm having a wonderful conversation. I've been told I'm deaf, mute, and simple. I've been tricked many times and I guess people will keep tricking me.
I miss home very badly. But I don't miss being lonely, and now I don't miss being silent.
~ Valisilwyn Dinenlhathron