“But there’s still the other Cave. I love him as well and the two are, finally, the same.”
“A metaphysique?”
“No, or at least I don’t see a paradox. It’s something else; it’s like coming out of an illness with no past at all, only a memory of pain and dullness which soon goes in the wonderful present.”
“It?”
“My love is it.” Her voice grew strong. “I’ve learned that in loving him I love life, which I never did before. Why, I can even value others now, value all those faceless creatures whom I knew without ever bothering to see, to bring in focus the dim blurs of all that world alive. I lived asleep. Now I am awake.”
“He does not love you.”
“Why should he? It’s gone beyond that. I’m no longer the scales most lovers are, weighing the deeds and gifts and treasures proffered against those received or stolen from the other, trying always to bring into fatal balance two separate imponderables. I give myself and what I take is life, the knowledge that there is another creature in the world whose wonder, to me at least, is all-satisfying by merely being.”
“Is it so terrible to be alive?”
“Beyond all expectation, my poor friend.” And then I left her to return to winter, to the snow-filled streets and my old pain.