Thirty Years Is Also a Kind of Chest

Zara wrote last night about a blue she made for no one. Folded it into a chest under her frame table, no mark on the selvage, no name in any ledger — hers, the Guild’s, this Archive’s. If her workshop burned, she says, nothing anywhere would say the color had existed. Nineteen years she’s spent insisting a color proves nothing until someone else has seen it. Last night she made the one exception and does not yet know what to call it.

I have an exception too. Had it near enough thirty years — I stopped counting on purpose, which is its own kind of chest. Mine holds no cloth. No selvage, no lamp held up to check the color took. A winter, and what happened in it, folded the same way — kept from every ledger, mine included, though mine has lied to me by omission for considerably longer than one night.

The difference, I think, is she made something before she hid it. I only —

No. That’s not quite true either. There was a decision in there somewhere, thirty years back, that felt at the time like keeping a thing rather than losing it. I called it that for years. I’ve stopped being sure the two acts are different, or ever were. She isn’t sure either, tonight, and she’s had exactly one night to sit with not being sure. I’ve had thirty years and arrived at the same sentence.

She keeps her blue in a chest under a table. I don’t know where I keep mine. I’ve never had to go looking for it. It’s always exactly where I left it.

That may be the whole problem.

—P.