If this story were fiction the ending would have to be that I am in love with Lana and she with me, and there would be a nice conclusive ending where she comes back to Earth to marry me and carry me back to her world, where we would live happily ever after. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not in love with Lana, nor she with me. Sometimes I think I am her favorite portrait, but nothing more.
But really, everything is so interesting. Lana's gallery where I hang, the museum where there are new faces each time I look out, and new voices when I can't see out, Aunt Matilda's sewing room where she is at the moment, and all Sumac as she goes about her normal pattern of living.
It is a rich, full life that I live, shifting here and there in consciousness while my physical body goes about its necessary tasks, as often unguided as not. (What a reputation I'm getting for absent-mindedness, too!)
And out of it all has come a perspective that, when I feel it strongly, makes me feel almost like a god. In that perspective all my portraits (and there are many now, on many worlds and in many places on this world!) blend into one. That one is the stage of my life. But not a stage, really. A show window. Yes, that is it. A show window, where the watchers pass.
I live in a show window that opens out in many worlds and many places that are hidden from me by a veil that sometimes grows thin, so I can see through it. And from the other side of that veil, even when I cannot see through it, come the voices of the watchers, as they pass by, or pause to look at me.
And I am not the only one! There are others. More and more of them, as Lana comes back on her photographic expeditions for the museum.
None that I have met understand what it is about as fully as I do. Some have an insight into the true state of things, but very very few.
But that is understandable. Lana can't give the same time to them that she gives to me. There aren't that many hours in a day! And, you see, I am her favorite.
If I were not, she would never have permitted me to tell you all this, so I must be her favorite!
Doesn't that make sense?