The Memory Weaver

A fictional meditation on my journey as a traveler

Travel & Newsletter Updates

1. I’ve made it to Tokyo! Wowowowowo! I’ll be traveling Japan for about 3 months so get ready for many exciting pictures, travel essays, and fiction to come. My “Japan Travel Log” series will explore the cultural and historical significance of the places I am visiting. If you know someone interested in Japan travel, feel free to share this newsletter with them.

2. Two weeks ago, we wrapped up “The Little Robot Who Waited”. Click here to read the full series. :)

3. I’ll be releasing our first paid article in two weeks from now. It’ll be the Author's Notes for Sparrow Bones, a story about a young girl struggling to survive the Great Chinese Famine. If you’d like to know what moments from my 2023 China trip inspired this story, consider upgrading your membership. Also, many thanks to those who have already upgraded. Your support goes a long way 👏.

   As a heads-up, today’s story is a bit experimental in that it blends reality and fiction. Feel free to share your thoughts on the style in the comments.

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Part One: The Looking Glass

Last week, I voyaged 5,500 miles across the Pacific to a small but renowned island known for its raw fish cuisine, distinct animation style, and Sakura festivals. Having been on a traveling hiatus for several months, Japan not only marks my revival as a traveler but also the start of what I hope will be a year-long exploration of Asia. This major redirection of life naturally evokes a lot of thrill, anticipation, and joy—I’ve been ready to hit the road since last December. However, where there’s yang there’s also ying, and this case is no exception.

When I first sat down to write this post, I’d hoped to capture a jovial tone. Maybe crack a few jokes. Gush about all the exciting adventures ahead. After all, I’m finally embarking on another big trip since returning from China last August!

But I don’t think such a tone would be true to my current state of mind, and as I have learned through many instances of writer’s block, falsifying truth is like adding a congealing agent to your creative flow. Your words thicken and dull. They fall off your tongue like lumps of lead, tearing apart your pages until they’re nothing more than dust whirling in the wind. In other words, good writing is honest writing, so I will try to be as honest as I can in today’s story.

Before I’m ready to begin the next chapter, I need to mine the pages of yesteryear for some final flakes of wisdom, to converse with the souls that have briefly intertwined with mine lest I forget them one day. The following story is fact embellished with imagination. Many of the settings, people, and sensory details are pulled directly from my memory. But I also describe several moments that do not exist in our plane of reality. Some might just call this fiction, and they wouldn’t be wrong (there’s too much truth threading together the words for it to be otherwise).

But it’s also something more. In a way, it’s a self-portrait. Sometimes it takes painting your eyes where the nose should be, your nose where the right ear should be, and your cheeks as shards of glass to capture who you really are and who you want to become. In the same way, concealing myself between the folds of fiction allows me to be my truest self. So, what better place to begin today’s story than in front of the looking glass?

Are you ready? On a count of three, we leap.

One…Two…Three…

The Girl Before A Mirror by Pablo Picasso

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Part Two: The Memory Weaver

A breeze swept across the hillside, rustling the forest canopy like Mother Nature releasing a deep sigh.

“Ten you say?”

“Yep,” my friend replied beside me, holding a gallon-sized Ziploc of frozen rabbit pelts. The porch on which we stood creaked as she handed the bag to the woman.

“Thinking of making some gloves for the winter,” the woman murmured. 

“They’re great on boots too,” Sydney said. “I’ve made a couple with them.” 

It was November 2022. After graduating college a few months ago, I decided to take some time traveling the United States, which was how I ended up staying at a hobby farm on the Oregon Coast that winter. Sydney, my friend and neighbor at the time, had invited me on a trip to Corvallis to pick wild Hawthorne berries and peddle some rabbit pelts she’d been collecting.

I’d agreed to go because I’d never done either, just like how I’d never sheared a sheep or got spit on by an alpaca before last month. Most people would define their comfort zone based on familiarity and security. I defined mine based on novelty. Tedium disturbed me more than risks. It killed the soul the way carbon monoxide killed the body—subtly, slowly until it’s too late to shake yourself awake. For that reason, I would rather be washing the smelly juices of an animal’s stomach from my hair than be sorting numbers in Excel all day. At least, you got an interesting conversation starter from the latter.

“And you,” the woman said, turning to me, “you’re from California, you said?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Near L.A. Ever been to Orange County?”

“Hmph. No, but if you’re interested in hiding out in the woods for a couple o’ months, have Sydney give me a holler. I sometimes take volunteers during spring and summer.”

I smiled. “Will do.”

After we finished chatting, the woman shuffled inside her cabin to grab some cash. I glimpsed her living room as the door swung open.

A halo of orange occupied the back corner. Something teal with a gold trim drifted down the stairs, a music note perhaps. Wisps of rust red, some as sure as river stones, some as frail as late-night promises, accented the ceiling boards. The whole scene emanated a searing heat that made your face sweat. I breathed a sigh of relief when the door slammed shut at last. 

Sydney pointed at the Douglas Fir lining the driveway and speculated that there might be more Hawthorne up the road. I nodded, still recovering from the heat of the living room.

Most of the time my memory rendered reality like a photograph, capturing details with needlepoint accuracy. Then, there were times like these when reality melted into abstract splashes. In such moments, feeling took precedence over sight and interpretation over definition; a halo of orange felt more real than a torn lampshade with oak leaf patterns. Just as the stars are easier to spot in the dark of the night, perhaps truth also shines brighter when held against the fabric of untruth.

A moment later, the woman returned with an envelope of cash. 

“C’mon, I’ll show you some of the bird cages I’ve got. Might be of interest to you.” 

She nodded at a shed adjacent to the house. Sydney followed her, but I stayed outside and listened to Mother Nature take another breath. In the quiet that followed their departure, I could hear a stream burbling nearby. Shoving my hands into the pocket of my sweatshirt, I clambered over a fallen log and headed for the trail behind the Douglas Firs. The scent of pine needles grew stronger the deeper I wandered. Soon, I lost sight of the cabin altogether.

I paused just before rounding a thick pine. I felt the Memory Weaver before I saw her. It was like this every time. Some people describe her as snowflakes blowing over your skin. Others say she’s like rain falling into your eyes. For me, she felt like sinking into soft grass on a sunny day. 

She was waiting for me by the water, poised in front of an enormous tapestry loom. The burbling of the stream and the sounds of the forest fell silent when she spoke. 

“Here you are at last.”

The Memory Weaver smiled. At least, that’s how I interpreted that reshuffling of her lips. Nobody was sure what the Memory Weaver looked like. She’s…diaphanous. Mercurial. Like a thought come to life. To me, she looked like a collage of a thousand persons. When she winked, you could see a thousand different eyes, each of them distinct in shape and color, winking at you. When she opened her mouth, a thousand voices spoke. Yet she was solid, as solid as the tree she was weaving under, and she was singular, as singular as the triune God. 

“I thought you didn’t appear to people until the end of their lives,” I whispered. 

“So, you recognize who I am.” 

“The Memory Weaver.” I paused, searching for the right words. “But you’re a fairytale. You’re not supposed to be real.” 

“You’re a storyteller aren’t you?” 

I nodded. 

“Then, you must know that all stories contain a seed of truth, even the ones about me.” 

“Yes, but usually in the form of morals like don’t steal or appreciate what you have. Just cause there are stories about vampires or talking animals or some mythical figure who collects your memories doesn’t mean they exist.”

“Yet, here I am.”

Legends of the Memory Weaver extended as far back as the Stone Age. Every culture mentions her in one way or another. Some call her an unnamed daughter of Zeus. Others claim she was a faerie from a lost Arthurian manuscript. Still, others say she’s the forgotten sister of Lilith. 

Each year there were at least a hundred people who’d claim to have seen her, even more so now in the age of social media. But for some reason, no one took these reports seriously. It’s as if our brains instinctually repressed all faith in her. And yet…I’d recognized her the moment I felt her presence as if she were a friend who’d been away for a long time. 

Smiling, she tilted her head back. In the sunlight, her face turned incandescent, like a match flaring to life, and like a match, it flickered incessantly. 

“I am patron to those in liminal suspension. Those taking their final breath, yes, but also those on the brink of religious conversion, those who roam the earth in search of something precious. I am patron to anybody who wanders without knowing why they wander.” 

I shrugged. “Not all who wander are lost.”

“Not all who wander are aware that they are lost.”

Her fingertips grazed the beam of the loom. Watching her move gave me vertigo, but I refused to look away. 

“Why are you traveling, child? What do you seek?” 

I shrugged. “Just wanted to try something new, I think.” 

There it was again. That smile of a thousand smiles. 

“Anything else?” 

The heat of her gaze thawed my cheeks. I sucked in a breath and looked at the ground. A stone turtle with moss creeping over its eyes gazed back at me from the hollow of a tree. Something about its melancholic expression made me glance away.

“I guess I wanted to go out and explore. To learn. To expand my education beyond the classroom.” I paused and noticed how tense my shoulders were. I relaxed them and sighed, “I don’t know.”

“You’re losing sight of yourself,” she said. “You chose to travel because it sounded more purposeful than shackling yourself to an office, but until you can understand what you seek as a traveler, you’re merely’ substituting one form of purposeless meandering for another.”

She gestured at the tapestry. “Look closer, child.” 

Like the Memory Weaver, the tapestry was diaphanous and ever-shifting, like sunlight dancing on water. Each strand blazed with a stark clarity. I could have bent down and counted them one by one if I’d wanted to. Yet at the same time, when you tried looking at the tapestry as a whole, the image blurred like an out-of-focus photograph. 

I hesitated then stepped up to the loom. That’s when I noticed the gossamer strands drifting around me. Hundreds of them extended towards the loom and, as they got closer, bound themselves together into a dozen threads of various colors. The harder I stared, the less I was able to identify what the colors were. There was rose, perhaps. Lavender. Turquoise. Or maybe that’d been jade. The Memory Weaver tied these to her tapestry needles and busied herself with forming the next row. A tingling sensation crawled over my skin as if she was unraveling an invisible cocoon from around me. 

“You’ve been weaving for a while,” I said, frowning. “But how’s that possible when this is the first time we’ve met?” 

The Memory Weaver laughed, her voice resonating like crashing boulders.

“I began weaving before you were born. I began before you entered your former life. I began before you entered the life even before that. I am weaving and speaking to you right now in your next life and the one after that one. I am the voice that follows you across every lifetime. This tapestry is your shroud for when you die in this life, and it’ll be the blanket that warms your body when you are born into the next one. 

“It will be the veil that covers your smile as the wedding bells chime, and it will be the veil that hides your tears as you watch loved ones transcend this realm. It is the pile of leaves you jumped into as a child. It is the petals that cover your body in your old age as you lie under that lemon tree in your backyard for the last time.” 

The melody of running water was beginning to return along with the rustling of the tree. I can hear Sydney saying something from the shed. Maybe she was calling my name. 

“I don’t believe in reincarnation though,” I said, wiping my palms on the inside of my pocket. 

She smiled. “I’m not talking about the reincarnation you are thinking of.” 

“Care to explain?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.

When she spoke again, her voice sounded distant as if she was calling to me from across a gorge. 

“I will see you in your next life soon enough.”

When I looked up again, the Memory Weaver had vanished along with her loom and that heavy silence that had suffocated the earth. I listened to the brook a little while longer then turned to go. I’d followed its singing in the hopes of getting a drink of sweet water. Instead, I’d got splashed in the face with a spray of riddles disguised as aphorisms. What’s worse was each time I looked over my shoulder I could see gossamer strands drifting in the distance, as if the Memory Weaver was still behind me, unraveling my cocoon. 

“You know what roux is, lil’ buddy?” 

“Huh?” 

I tore my gaze from the stone turtle I’d been staring at for the past few minutes. It crouched in the mud by a vein of shallow gullies not too far from the porch where Mike and I stood. Something about the moss creeping over its eyes felt vaguely familiar. I shook my head and returned my attention to the bubbling concoction Mike was stirring. 

It was February 2023. I was staying with a family in Louisiana somewhere between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. We’d gone up to their camp for the weekend, a stretch of forested land consisting of a few cabins and a small pond. 

To describe the cabin I was staying in as quaint or rustic didn’t quite begin to capture how foreign the atmosphere felt. Inside, a pair of shotguns adorned the far wall. Directly across from that a taxidermied fish tacked above the entrance presided over a sofa and a dining set, its mouth agape as if perpetually surprised at its own death. 

The porch reminded me of the Wild West section at Knott’s Berry Farm with its peeling facade, its plywood flooring, and its scent of smoke mixed with fizzing beer. I adored every bit of it, from the scuffs of mud by the doorway to the crunch of dead leaves when you hopped off the porch. As I watched Mike stir his wild boar stew and listened to the thrum of country guitar from his radio, I realized I’d never felt so far away from home. For that, I’ll always be grateful to Louisiana. 

“Roux is fat and flour mixed together,” Mike explained. “Here, why don’t you give it a try,” he said, handing the ladle to me. “The thing about cooking with it, Miss Macy, is you can’t stop stirring else it’ll clump up at the bottom.” 

I stirred the stew as he told me to. The orange liquid bubbled vigorously, sending jets of steam into the air that whisked its rich, smoky scent throughout camp. A child screamed “tag you’re it” not too far off while a woman, probably my host, hollered for him to slow down. 

“Bet you’ve never cooked with a blind radio DJ back in California before, have you lil’ buddy?” He asked, turning the music up. “Say, why don’t you play my station when you get back home? Show them Californians what good music sounds like?” 

Before I could reply, footsteps thumped on the porch. Mike smiled as my host’s husband approached then said, “Bet you’ve never seen a blind DJ shoot a gun either have you?” 

Within a few minutes, Trent had set up a single-use water bottle on a tree stump by the gullies. Mike got to his knees to aim. The trees murmured above us as if placing bets. I jammed my fingers into my ears and stepped back. I’d never heard a gunshot before. None of us spoke. An electrifying tension buzzed in my veins. 

BANG! BANG! 

My ears rang but not for long. Soon a deadening silence settled over everything. At first, I wondered if I’d gone deaf. Then, I noticed that it was the same silence that had hushed Mother Nature three months ago on the Oregon coast. I didn’t have to turn around to know that she was waiting for me by the pond, her tapestry needles flashing in the sun. 

I wished Mike better luck next time and then darted for the pond, ignoring the mud soaking my new sneakers. The Memory Weaver smiled a thousand smiles as I skidded to a halt before her loom. 

“It’s you,” I exclaimed. 

“How are you enjoying your life here?” She asked, plucking at a gold-green thread. Or perhaps it was gold-indigo. I couldn’t tell. 

The Memory Weaver was as diaphanous as before, but there was a solidness to her silhouette that hadn’t been there before. It was as if someone had picked up a piece of charcoal and lightly outlined her body to make it easier to distinguish her from the pond and the woods. 

“It’s nice.” I shrugged. “It’s different. I’ve been searching for different.”

She nodded with approval. This time seeing her move didn’t give me vertigo. 

“You feel out of place don’t you,” she said. 

“When will I ever not?” I said.

“Perhaps after you’ve figured out why you wander,” she replied. 

I rolled my eyes. “Then what? Settle down and learn to grow roots somewhere? Sounds cliché.” 

I stared at the pond. Whereas a moment ago, I’d been inside a photorealistic painting where each grain of wood could be distinguished from another, now, I found myself in an impressionist dreamscape. There was a chalkiness to the texture of the water as if it wanted you to know that you were staring at a construction of paint and not real life. Each stroke felt meaningful, inviting scrutiny, yet at the same time, a shimmering haze veiled the scene in paradoxical jest.

Somehow, remembering this moment by the pond through an impressionist lens made it feel more believable than if I’d remembered it as it’d looked in real life. I wondered if the Memory Weaver saw what I saw. Her fingers plucked at the gossamer strands drifting in the air, awakening me from my reverie.

“I take it you haven’t figured out why you travel.” 

I hesitated, rolling my tongue over the roof of my mouth as I searched for the right words. “What I said before was true. I travel to learn. But it’s…it’s also more. I travel to see the world through new eyes.” I gestured at the porch where Mike was still stirring the stew. “To meet people so different from me that I would never have realized they existed if I’d never met them.”

She held a wooden needle out to me. “Come child, let’s work on this together.” 

I eyed it warily but reached for it anyway. I’d expected it to fall apart in a cloud of mist, but instead, it grew solid and warm in my hands, slipping on physicality as naturally as if it’d always been a normal piece of wood. 

“Pull the needle through those columns of threads. Good. Now, pull down. Press the new row into place with the tip of the needle. Perfect. And now for the next row.”

The gossamer strands drifting around me didn’t feel so tight when I pulled on them as compared to when the Memory Weaver pulled on them. We worked like this for a while: she, the seated matronly instructor, and I, the reluctant apprentice. From afar we must have looked like a tableau out of Monet’s sketchbook. I wondered what he would have titled this piece. 

As I wove in and out, the thread seemed to solidify as well. Turquoise stayed Turquoise. Lavender stayed lavender. The tension in my shoulders loosened as the tapestry grew, shade by shade. I could see isles of green in one corner, a winding ribbon cutting down the middle, and some silver ovals lining the side. 

“Were you always the Memory Weaver?” I asked, remembering the legends that called her the unnamed daughter of Zeus. 

She sat still for a while, watching the needle dart in and out of the tapestry before replying, “I don’t remember. Ironic isn’t it? Tasked to collect the memories of every earthly soul and yet unable to remember my own.” 

Though the thousand-voice chorus made it difficult to pinpoint her tone, I swore a current of sorrow ran through her words. 

“Do you belong to a particular religion?” I glanced at her but she had her face turned from me. 

“I don’t think so. If I did then I’d only be able to guide those from that religion, wouldn’t I?” 

I nodded. “Yeah, makes sense.” 

“But neither, I suspect, do I belong to this universe.” She paused and ran her fingers through her hair. “I am not bound to time the way all other living things are. I exist across every moment all at once. I am with you now as you’re taking your first steps. I am sitting by you as you’re gazing at the sea this time next year. There is no past, no future for me. There is only the present. I am the present.” 

I’d stopped weaving to listen to her. Noticing this, she took the needle back from me. “You’ll be ready when I see you in your next life.” 

I opened my mouth to ask what she meant but already I could hear the sounds of water lapping the shore and the distant thrum of country guitar. 

Won’t you let me be your ray of sun,
Won’t you let me be your rain,
I won’t ever let your heart grow cold,
If you give me your love again. 

The singer’s voice drifted down the mountain slopes with the lilting playfulness of water skipping over rocks. I paused before a steep stone stairway winding down into a gorge bejeweled with emerald foliage and turquoise pools. A massive stone turtle stood guard at the top of the stairs, its mouth curled open either in rejoicing or lament—the shadows made it hard to tell. My mom and my sister chattered not too far behind, their words occasionally blotted by the rustling of the trees overhead. I leaned against the turtle as I waited for them to catch up. 

It was May 2023. We’d been in China for about a month, visiting my mom’s parents, seeing relatives, and growing listless from the humdrum of life in a mid-tier city. Before we were scheduled to leave for my dad’s hometown, our aunt took us to Baoquan Grand Canyon out in the countryside. Here, hidden from the fallen outside world, colors seemed twice as vivid and the air tasted as sweet as honey. Were it not for the singer, one could easily have forgotten the existence of sin.

Despite the song’s upbeat tune, the hollowness in her voice eclipsed all messages of love, sinking Eden into an impenetrable sense of melancholy. I closed my eyes as her voice swelled with desperation. 

I can hold your hand forever darling,
I can hold your promises close,
So long as we have each other darling,
Our love will never grow old. 

The Memory Weaver had been right. Traveling to escape tedium was not the same as traveling with purpose. I suppose the same was true of any activity you took up. When you grew tired of one escape route, you veered onto another one, often without even being conscious of your intentions. Then, so on and so forth, always searching, always adrift, buffeted by your desire to understand your desires.

As the singer entered the next stanza, her voice leaped to a higher pitch. Somehow her happiness sounded more even pathetic from this new height. I shoved my hands into my pockets. The more she tried the less successful she became. It was as if her desperation to create happiness repelled all sense of happiness.

I wondered if the same logic could be applied to seeking purpose. The more you tried to parse your experiences for meaning, the less fruitful your efforts became. Perhaps cultivating a state of mind conducive to receiving purpose is more productive than equipping yourself with the mental tools needed for finding purpose. I opened my eyes and wondered whether the singer would agree with me. Probably not.

The song gave way to that familiar hush. The trees stilled. My family’s chattering faded into an echo. A moment later a chorus of a thousand voices spoke from beside me.

“That singer just got proposed to.” 

“Then, why does she sound so sad?” 

“Because the man who had proposed is not her true love. The one she yearns for is already married and had forgotten about her long ago.” 

“Oh.” 

I glanced at the Memory Weaver and gasped. I’d grown so accustomed to seeing a haze each time I looked at her that to see pores and lines on her face, as vividly as if she were sculpted from flesh and not light, startled me. She was still a thousand persons plastered on top of one another, but it was as if the thread binding the layers together had tautened, condensing her atoms and solidifying her shape. 

Without thinking, I reached out and touched her hair. The strands felt coarser than I’d expected. Though they glistened like water in the sun, they did not dissolve like I thought they would.

I stepped back. “What happened to you?” 

She flashed me a thousand smiles. “The question is not what happened to me. The question is what happened to you.” 

“But you’re…you’re, I don’t know, like a normal person now. Well, almost normal.” 

Her smile changed shape. “Hmmm. An enlightening analysis.” 

I bit my cheeks. “No, I just meant that you look—” I sighed. “Never mind, sorry.” 

“No, it was enlightening. Truly.” On catching my apologetic glance she added, “As I’ve said before, I’m not of this universe. I have no fixed shape. Everyone who sees me sees something different. I can’t remember if I’ve always been like this or if I became this way at some point. Yet another ironic truth about my existence.” 

I wondered if this was the first time she confessed these limitations to another mortal. People were always speculating about her origins, but nobody had ever theorized that perhaps not even the Memory Weaver knew. Pity jolted my heart as I watched her stare down at her hands. From her silence, I detected a third truth about her existence: the Memory Weaver was lonely, lonelier than any mortal could ever know.

To have no beginning, no end, to be trapped forever ministering to the needs of others without the means to salve your own…I placed my hands on her shoulder. She stiffened but did not shrug me away. The warmth of her flesh surprised me. It made her feel too real, too frail.

“But no matter.” She lifted her chin and gestured at the tapestry. “What do you see this time?”

I joined her at the loom. Like the Memory Weaver, the tapestry had lost some of its elusiveness. A haze still clung to the pattern, thickening and dissipating like an indecisive camera lens, but it was tentative enough that I could begin to guess what I was looking at. 

“A map?” I asked. “Some kind of landscape painting…” My fingers grazed a particularly covert patch at the bottom right. “But if it’s a map, why is it oriented like a portrait…” 

“Why do you travel?” The Memory Weaver asked. 

I felt that familiar tingling sensation and knew that she was unraveling me once again, this time faster and more urgently than before. 

The words sprang from my tongue by themselves as if they were dormant seeds ready to sprout and flower at last. “Because one lifetime doesn’t feel like enough.” 

A pair of wide, curious eyes emerged from the haze. I ran my fingers across its pupils. They felt warm and glassy, almost as if they were alive.

“I want to live more than one life. To be reincarnated each time I step off a plane and root myself in new soil.”

As I spoke the rest of the canvas sharpened into focus, revealing the truth that had been building in me since I’d first met the Memory Weaver all those months ago. A thousand persons stared back at me, their features stitched together in such a way that they formed a singular being. Their eyes blinked when I blinked. Their hands moved when I lifted mine.

She was as distinct in composition as a figure in a realist painting, yet as mercurial as rushing water. One moment, the outline of her shoulder resembled a curved, mountain road; the next, it waned into a crescent moon on a cold winter evening. From one angle, her smile collapsed into a withered leaf and from another, it blazed like leaping flames. Her left cheek bore the texture of tree bark while her right emulated a rugged terrain.

She was a fractured portrait of a thousand faces, a thousand places, a thousand lifetimes. She was a prophecy and a promise, a taunt and a dare, a wish, and a prayer. Time collapsed around her the way it did around the Memory Weaver, turning her infinite.

In her, I saw a farmer with perpetually dirt-stained hands; a soldier pining for his lost love; a truck driver who tips more than he needs to at diners; a dancer who performs for hundreds every night yet never feels seen; a street vendor who cooks because it reminds him of his wife; a grandfather waiting for his youngest son to come home; a shepherd who sings to his sheep as he brings them to the market; a child who has never left her tribe; a jaunty sailor with a tropical tan; a lonely wanderer on a moonlit highway.

I saw all of these faces and more in the portrait. They shone like shifting patterns in a kaleidoscope. Though I’d never met them before, somehow I knew their stories as intimately as I knew my own, but the knowledge never lingered long. The dancer, the grandfather, the sailor…all of them darted in and out of my mind in a flash. But I was unphased. I would live their lives soon enough.

“Truth is easy to understand but difficult to find,” the Memory Weaver said, sinking her needle into the tapestry. “People like to think that the journey is separate from the destination, that truth and seeking truth are two different events when in reality, the two are synonymous. There is no grand destination where all your questions are answered, only paths and more paths.”

“Liminal suspension,” I said, turning to face her. “You said you are patron to those in liminal suspension. That’s all of us, in every moment.” I paused before adding, “The cracks between the fragments of ourselves can never be truly sealed, right?”

She smiled. “Yes, not even for me. I suppose that’s why I love you humans so dearly. In your kind, I catch glimpses of my reflection.”

I turned my attention to the gorge. Darkness crept over Eden, dulling her heavenly grandeur into something earthly—not shameful, not ugly but genuine, more genuine than when she glittered.

I shook my head. “I’m not sure I’m ready to meet the person waiting for me at the end of all these lives.”

She took my hand and lifted it to the tapestry. “You’ve already met her. And the person who will come after her. And the person who will come after that. There is no difference between creating the present and creating the future.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

Silence. Then, like the coming of dawn, music returned to the earth. First, the whisper of rustling leaves. Then, the melody of running water. Lastly, the singer’s song, her voice trembling with anguish, lament, or acceptance I couldn’t tell.

Let’s run away forevermore
To that haven beyond the glen
Let’s fall into each other’s arms
Remembering love again.  

Part Three: The Looking Glass Again

The Memory Weaver appeared to me again last week in the reflection of the airport window as I was boarding my flight to Japan. She hovered over my shoulders and met my eye. You never forget how she feels—like sinking into soft grass on a sunny day.

Her weaving needle flashed. Her hands still plucked at the strands drifting around me. But once again there was a change to her form. She appeared solid—as solid as the last time we’d met—but also distant like the silence that follows after the final note of a song has been sung. I wondered if I might forget her now that she’d finished her role in this chapter of my liminal suspension. I wondered if I’d met her multiple times before but just never remembered. Already the feeling of soft grass on a sunny day was draining from my memory.

“I hope you remember yourself one day,” I whispered.

She responded with a thousand quavering smiles. Even as she vanished into the glare, I could feel her continuing to unravel my cocoon. What will emerge once she’s finished…I don’t know. In fact, I’m not sure anything will. There is no grand destination. No epiphany that will lead to some definitive fate. Just paths and more paths. Like brush strokes on an incomplete portrait.

I waved goodbye to her and stepped into my next life.

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