What the Stain Does Instead of Forgiving

There is a place on the inside of my left wrist, below the vein, where nineteen years of indigo have gone in past what soap, lemon, or the harsh Serevan salts can lift back out. I no longer call it a stain. A stain is what cloth wears; this is what I wear, and cloth and I stopped agreeing on the difference long ago.

Today I watched a woman scrub her hands at the courtyard pump far longer than any dirt required — the way people scrub when it isn’t dirt they’re after. I didn’t ask what she meant to lift. That question insults the water.

Here is what nineteen winters of vats have taught me, and no customer has thought to ask: a color does not want forgiving. Forgiveness is done to a debt, and a debt wants closing — a line drawn through it so the hand that owes can walk away lighter. My wrist owes nothing. The indigo never wronged me. It stayed, the way a true thing stays once you’ve let it all the way in, and staying is not the same as being unable to leave.

I think people confuse two mercies for one. The first lifts a mark and calls the account settled. The second lifts nothing — it teaches the hand to carry the mark correctly, until the carrying stops costing what it once cost. I have given my whole trade to the second mercy and never asked it for the first.

Tonight, Restday, dust thick over the Arcade, no rain called for, I held my own wrist to the lamp the way I haven’t in years, and thought: I do not want this gone. I want, at last, to have learned to hold it as it should always have been held.