Diary of an Edgeless Scholar: Resting in Revani

Time, I have concluded, is a garment in its own right, and I am presently not wearing it. This makes dating this entry somewhat approximate. I shall place it somewhere between the last time I felt urgency and the first time I began to feel curious again, which those still in possession of a life will have to accept as sufficient.

I was a scholar. I remain one, as it turns out. The coat comes off but the habits, apparently, linger. I have been drifting through the hall taking notes in a manner of speaking, which is to say that I have no notebook and no hands and no ink, but the impulse is there, which tells me something about the persistence of character that I would very much like to publish, if I could locate a journal willing to accept submissions from contributors who are technically not currently in possession of a post box or a coat of life.

The hall is extraordinary from this side of things, and I say that having spent two lifetimes, or possibly three, I am genuinely uncertain, writing about it from the other side. You cannot appreciate the coats properly when you are embodied. You walk in with your heartbeat and your cold feet and your notebook and you see cloth, you see shape, you see the sheer quantity of them hanging in their patient rows and you write down something earnest about continuity and then you go home for supper. But drifting through them without edges, without the particular noise a body makes simply by existing, you begin to understand that each one is still faintly inhabited. Not haunted. That is the wrong word entirely and I will not have it. Inhabited, the way a house retains the warmth of its people long after they have stepped out for the evening.

One coat near the eastern wall smells of river water and pine resin and something I can only describe as the particular satisfaction of having been right about something important. I drift past it often. It feels like a good life, that one. The sort of life that did not waste much time on hesitation. I find I respect it enormously.

Another, hanging slightly apart from the others as though it has always preferred its own company, carries the echo of a great deal of laughter and what I suspect was a fairly cavalier attitude toward personal safety. Several of its buttons have been replaced at different times. I find this deeply interesting from a biographical standpoint and rather wish I could read what is written in its lining, because I am nearly certain something is written there, and I am not accustomed to nearly certain.

I have no edges at present. I am, if I understand my own condition correctly, approximately the shape of a question. Warm and unhurried and diffuse at the boundaries, which I will confess took some adjustment after a lifetime, or several, of being the sort of person who walked into rooms with purpose and moved furniture about and held opinions at considerable volume. The first while of edgelessness felt, if I am honest, rather like the moment after setting down a very heavy bag you had forgotten you were carrying. The relief was so complete that I simply rested in it, drifting through the First Light of the valley with the pleasant vacancy of someone who has finished a long book and has not yet decided what to read next.

But lately, and this is what I wish to record whilst the thought is coherent, lately there has been something new. A quality of attention returning. A leaning toward, rather than a simple drifting through. I passed a coat this morning, a deep greenish thing with a wide hem that moved in a way I found unexpectedly compelling, and I did not drift past it in the usual fashion. I slowed. I considered it. It did not stir. We regarded one another with mutual interest for what might have been an afternoon, or a season, or a perfectly pleasant Tuesday, and then I moved on, because I was not ready and neither was it, and this place does not rush.

This is what I could not have written from the other side, the part that no coat-wearing scholar can quite reach: that becoming is not a decision. It is a recognition. Something in you knows, before you have words for the knowing, that a particular shape of life is gathering itself in your direction. You do not choose it so much as you notice, with a deep and quiet certainty, that it has already chosen you. The coat stirs. You stir back. And then, when the moment is the right moment, which cannot be forced and cannot be missed because this place has arranged itself rather cleverly on that front, you put it on, and off you go.

I find I am looking forward to it, in the way that one looks forward to a journey one is not quite ready to begin. Not impatiently. Not with any urgency whatsoever. Simply with the pleasant awareness that the road is there, and that I shall be walking it again in due course, with new feet and a new name and the full and magnificent inconvenience of having edges.

I believe I shall have things to say, when I do.

I generally do.

Recovered from the pale light of Revani by the Coat Keepers, who noted that the fragment arrived folded neatly, warm to the touch, and smelling faintly of river water and ink.