LOST Chapter 11: Hana Talks

Read chapter 11 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

After he went upstairs I washed the cups. This is a thing I do. Not only the cups, not only after conversations like this one, but there is something particular about the washing up after a conversation where I have been careful, where I have held the shape of what I was going to say and not say and said it correctly. My hands need something ordinary to do. The water is hot and the cups are simple and I wash them the way I wash everything, thoroughly and without thinking about it, and by the time they are on the drying rack I am usually back to whatever I need to be back to. Tonight it took two cups and a small plate and a long time staring at the water running over my hands before I felt like myself again. He had not asked why. This is the thing I keep returning to, the thing that distinguished him from most of the others I have sat across the kitchen table from over six years. They ask why. Most of them ask it in the first five minutes, some of them ask it before I have finished the first sentence, and the question is almost always the same in its structure even when it varies in its phrasing: why would you choose to stay. As though staying were the unusual option. As though leaving were so self-evidently correct that remaining required justification. He had processed the information I gave him and filed the gap where the reason would be and moved to the next question. Which was: are there others. And then: do any of them know how to go back. The questions of someone who was not ready yet to consider staying as a real option, who was still in the phase where going back was the goal and staying was a consequence of failing to go back. I recognized this phase. I had been in it myself. I pulled the drain plug and dried my hands. The guesthouse was quiet. Mei asleep, or doing her not-sleeping, the particular quality of her silence when she was in her room and not quite ready to commit to the end of the day. Room four had gone quiet. The building made its small sounds, the old wood, the pipes. Outside, the harbor. I went and sat at the kitchen table again, not because I needed to sit but because standing felt wrong, and I looked at the place where his cup had been and thought about why. The why is not simple. This is the first thing to understand about it, that the why is not a single reason but a set of reasons that have accumulated over six years and become a structure, and you cannot remove one reason from the structure without the whole thing shifting, and I do not particularly want the whole thing shifting. The simple version: I have a daughter. She is seven and she has her father's chin and she is entirely native to this world and she is, in the accounting I do when I cannot sleep, the reason that makes every other reason unnecessary. I could stop at Mei and it would be sufficient. People do stop there, when I give them enough of the shape of it. They nod and they understand and they do not ask further. But the simple version is not the whole version and I have lived long enough in a world that is not quite mine to have stopped accepting the simple version of things just because it is easier to carry. My world was W-03. I say this now with the flatness of a fact because that is what it has become, six years of daily life against a reality that does not particularly care where I came from has a way of flattening the facts into manageability. My world was W-03. It had the same geography as this one, the same harbor, the same shrine on the headland, the same coastal light. It had differences I still find, occasionally, when I stop paying attention, when I reach for something on instinct and find it not where I expected, when I say something that lands slightly wrong in a conversation and cannot locate why. In W-03, Mei's father was alive. Here he is not. Here he died four years before I crossed, in a way that had nothing to do with world mechanics or ruptures or any of the large complicated things I spend my time on now. He di