Chapter 1021: Chapter 1021 - Taming Impossible Puzzles - 5

Selphira looked at the three of them, each in turn.

"The idealized love they sell you in stories is safe precisely because it doesn’t exist. The real obsessive kind is dangerous precisely because it does. That’s why the better version is the one you define for yourselves, the one that doesn’t need to match any particular template to be and doesn’t need to be relevant to anything outside the people in it."

Mayo, in the chair, was noticeably quiet.

It was the particular quiet of someone who had started to say something "intelligently hidden in a joke" and had arrived, somewhere between the opening of her mouth and the closing of it, at the realization that there was nothing to add.

"I want you to understand that in the first place you don’t need to find this so-called true love to have a healthy and lasting relationship, one that nourishes you and whoever you’re with..."

"...I have calculated that more than half the people who have been in long relationships have been unfaithful at some point."

A pause to let that land.

"And most of those who weren’t didn’t avoid it because of love. They avoided it because of fear, political convenience, loyalty to family or not wanting to lose what they believed they had." Another pause. "The instinct never goes away. You are always going to find other attractive people attractive, and so will he... no matter how much he loves the person or people who will be his partners. That doesn’t make what you have false. It only means the instinct was always there and they chose not to follow it. Which is different."

"And that doesn’t invalidate everything, if at some point the instinct doesn’t let us be faithful in thought?" said Liora. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"No." The answer arrived direct, without preamble. "Because we are what we are and we have to accept it. And because the decision not to follow the instinct is exactly the only thing you control in any of this. The instinct isn’t going anywhere. And that doesn’t mean what exists between you isn’t real. It only means you’re human and life is longer and more complex than it looks from the age you’re at right now."

Liora looked at the floor.

"Then what’s the point of understanding the love you’re describing if we can’t feel it?" she asked, quieter.

Selphira smiled and took a moment.

"Nothing external," she said. "Like perfect idealized happiness, that can only come from being grateful to be alive and for the opportunity to experience things. Like almost anything worth having. Real love lives inside you and depends entirely on how you choose to see it. You can’t force anyone to feel it and no one can take it from you if you have it. Only you can."

She looked at the three of them.

"I’m telling you all of this because if you fight over him, nobody will be satisfied. If you share him under superficial conditions, nobody will be satisfied either. And if one of you wins and the others end up outside, nobody will be satisfied then either. Not even the winner. Because we are never going to be satisfied, we always want more winning, more acquiring, more ’growing’. That is the nature of what we are, not a flaw to fix but something to understand and work around."

She let her gaze rest on each of them in turn, without urgency.

"If you don’t start from yourselves, you won’t enjoy life no matter how it turns out. You are already daughters of privilege, all three of you. You have lost a great deal of what you loved, yes, but in this city that is the rule, not the exception. The poor and weak children of this city in the same circumstances who don’t have the luxury of sitting in a room like this one to discuss this exist in enormous numbers."

"That doesn’t invalidate what you feel. But it does mean there are things to be grateful for before you complain."

"So if it’s not love but gratitude, if it’s Luna conceding or if it’s sharing... Those are not bad situations in your context. Make something good of them. Enjoy what they offer and find the advantages..."

"You’re not ordinary girls."

"You carry enormous responsibilities on your shoulders. Be mature enough not to wait for the mistake to try to understand, understand now, from the harder place, from someone else’s experience."

Then she looked longer at each of them one by one.

She looked at Luna first.

"Luna Starweaver," she said, in a tone that was serious, more direct, but without the hardness she sometimes carried when she was direct with people she considered less significant, "you are going to find this easier than the others think. You already understood that you want what’s best for him. You already understood that you want what’s best for them too."

"But watch yourself for a very common mistake."

Luna looked at her.

"If you give, give because you want to give. Not because you feel you have an outstanding debt. Not because suffering feels more honest to you than enjoying." Selphira held her gaze with enough steadiness to reach past the expression and into her soul, into wherever the younger woman was deciding things. "Suffering is not more noble than happiness, it’s only easier to hide."

She let that sit.

"Embrace everything you’re accepting, or don’t accept it. There’s no middle ground that works over time."

Luna nodded once.

Selphira looked at Liora.

"You perceive emotions with more clarity than most people. You feel them more strongly too. That’s real and it’s part of who you are."

A pause.

"So Liora Ashenway... You’re going to have to learn that feeling something strongly doesn’t make that feeling more important than everything else. Life is longer and more complex than it looks from where you’re standing right now."

She held Liora’s eyes with the same analytical intensity that she gave Luna or anything she was genuinely trying to understand.

"Stop idealizing what you feel. This age is deceptive, it doesn’t mean I want you to love less, but to understand you and ’love’ better. What you feel is real... But it is not the most important thing that is going to happen in your life."

Liora didn’t respond.

But something in her shifted one degree... Not agreement exactly. Something more like the first contact with an idea that needed more time than it had been given.

Selphira looked at Larissa last.

Larissa had been expecting to be last.

She had also been expecting, in the private part of herself where she ran the honest version of assessments, something in the direction of acknowledgment, that she had handled the situation with a clear head, with more maturity and forward vision than the other two.

"Larissa Dravenholm..."

"...You are the worst of the three."

Larissa opened her mouth.

"Not because you’ve done anything wrong," Selphira continued, without giving her room to respond yet. "But because you hide the most. You’ve been behind political logic in this entire matter as though that made you objective."

She looked at Larissa directly, the same unsparing attention she had given the other two.

"It doesn’t make you objective. It makes you the only one who hasn’t said a single thing that was truly hers."

Larissa closed her mouth.

"You would have been the first to stab the other two in the back if you believed that doing so meant keeping him for yourself permanently."

Said without cruelty or contempt, a diagnosis, not a condemnation.

"Not because you’re a bad person... But because you repress a huge obsession instead of bringing it out and working through it. You repress it so well that when it breaks open..." a pause, "...and it always breaks open, without warning... You will regret it."

Her eyes didn’t move from Larissa’s.

"Cry when you need to cry. Feel what you feel instead of immediately converting it into work. That doesn’t make you weak. Your situation is the opposite of Liora’s, give more weight to your own internal desires."

A longer pause.

"But remember the same thing I told Liora: feeling isn’t the most important thing. And repressing it doesn’t make you stronger. It only makes you more dangerous, to yourself and to the people near you."

Larissa pressed her teeth together and fixed her eyes on a point on the wall. Something in them went slightly glassy before she managed the rest of it.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Mayo, who had been quiet for longer than anyone in the room could have reasonably asked her to be quiet, looked at Selphira with something that was close to genuine respect.

"And you?" she said. Quietly for once.... Without the teasing tone as always. "Four hundred years and all of that. How are you managing it?"

Selphira looked at her.

Then looked at the recovered arm, still learning to be hers again.

"Terribly," she said. And smiled, the smile of someone who has arrived at a certain peace with an answer that isn’t the one they would have chosen but that is the honest one. "But that’s my problem and I prefer it that way."