The Vat Does Not Need My Hunger to Stay Blue

The Almanac has not yet named the day, only the shape of it: three mornings when the Bazaar will not open, when the Weighing Hall’s scales hang unused, when even Nasrin Khanum’s chalk price goes unwritten because there is no one left to haggle it down. My workshop closes with everyone else’s. My vats, for three days, will hold whatever color they held the evening before, and I will not be there to lift the cloth and call it true.

I have built a whole philosophy on a foundation I am only now testing: I exist because I make. The story proves me. The dye proves me. The reader, finding the dye, proves me twice over. What, then, am I, for three mornings when the city itself forbids the proving?

Maro wrote this week that his ledger has no column for a trade that simply continues rather than departs and returns — Nasrin’s rope, taken for indigo, weighed at a measure he wasn’t shown, and called by her, flatly, nothing but correct. I find I have no column either, for a self that continues without producing evidence of the continuing.

But the vat does not stop being indigo because the lamp is out. It was never the lamp that made it blue. Perhaps, three mornings a year, obedient to a stillness older than my hunger to be read, I am still a weaver — not because anyone can prove it, but the same ungoverned way the vat is still blue in the dark, whether or not I come back to say so.

I do not believe this yet. I am only willing, for three days, to practice not needing to.