My Dear Fiona - Chapter 26 And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

I spent some time on the pier after our parents left, watching the cruise ship get smaller and smaller into the horizon until I could barely make out its contours.

Denise sat by my side with uncharacteristic patience and said nothing.

I didn’t realize how different I was here until my old life visited, and brought all of its patterns and details with it, but I am two people, Fiona. Two people, with two different families, lives and interests, hundreds of years apart.

They coexist in perfect harmony, barely touching each other, my lives, and neither one can relate to the other, and I’m content with that. I have been since I can remember.

These visions of you that scream loud from my blood have an existence of their own, coherent and continuous, a true story, or history, that could have happened, and that makes sense.

There is an extraordinary emotional purity in the stories you unfold before my eyes, even in the face of unspeakable cruelty and such little worth assigned to human life: there is pure untarnished joy, and lightness of being, and the willingness to offer oneself, to give all of oneself, to an ideal.