1/9/364
The Tubori, my romantic people, have a word that has no good equivalent in Lithmorran – or any other language I know, at that.
Allawahu*, the missing of a thing perhaps irretrievably lost. The sadness of its absence, the joy that it brought to you, and the resignation that we are all bound to and broken on the great wheel of Fate. Allawahu is woven into the life of the Tubori; it is the feeling for a companion lost at sea ten years ago and never recovered, or for proud Tubor the great Kingdom before it was crushed by the traitor Jaren.
It is sharper than nostalgia, more potent than wistfulness, more complex than melancholy; deeper than poignancy, more stubborn than memory, sweeter than despair.
For allawahu, you must have loved something (even if you did not realize it; in a way it is all the better if you did not realize it) and have lost it, yet you remain neither sure nor unsure if it will ever return again. That is the added torment that it gives to you: you remember its sweetness and you simply do not know if you can have it again. A sadness untainted by hope is a sadness that can be put away, in time; the sadness of allawahu whispers in your even ear decades later, a quiet suggestion that not all is lost. Listen to it too long and you’ll stay rooted in one place, thinking the past could perhaps return.
I know allawahu intimately. Mostly I see it in faces and names, when I re-read my journal or my letterbooks some quiet, rainy evening. Lien, Bryne, Trouble… perhaps you might come back, someday, and things would be like they were before. (But they cannot be like they were before. Not now, not that Lien has a daughter and a dead husband; not now when Bryne is a heretic confirmed twice over; not now when Trouble comes and goes and every time we meet we both are sadder.)
I would spare Shaylei that. Whatever the objective truth might be, the reality must be that Argider is dead. I won’t see her sit staring out her window pining for a hope slim as a needle, fine as dust. Growing old in listless solitude waiting on the return of a dead man. It’s not my choice to make, but when have I let that stop me?
I don’t know that I think she’ll need it. I saw the signs of both recovery and danger in her, when we spoke – a foot on each of the paths that follow from grief. She is strong, but strength has very little to do it in the end. We all falter. So, if it comes to that, I will not let her hurt herself with hope. If anyone can be cruel to be kind, it is me.
Hope is dangerous. Allawahu is dangerous. And yet, I am giving into it myself, aren’t I?
No – it’s not the same. I am choosing action. Instead of standing still and dreaming foolishly of a past that is almost certainly lost, I am moving forward, taking steps. I am reaching to reclaim it myself. Is it stupid? Oh, very possibly. Is it ridiculous? Also possibly that.
In the last few months I have been happier. I’ve felt myself thinking things might be supportable this way, after all. And that… that is the hope I fear most of all. I don’t want to accept reality. I don’t want to mourn uselessly for that which is lost. I want a third path.
I’ll make a third path. My will is filed; all that’s left is the final planning. And if it goes poorly, Lord protect my loved ones from any allawahu of their own.
*This post brought to you by saudade, a Portuguese emotion term I thought very fitting for the Tubori people and renamed ‘allawahu’ to make it sound Tubori. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade)
