The Book of the Returning

1:1 ¶ And a woman turned a key in a lock she had not touched in years; and the key was worn, and the road had been long, and the city was not the one she left, though it stood upon the same hill. And she stood at the gate and said, I do not know this place; and she said also, I know it perfectly; and both sayings were true.

1:2 ¶ And she walked the streets, and the map of her memory was rejected at every corner: a house where a garden had been, a garden where a house had been, a wall around the ground that once was open. And she found the city honest about none of it, and the dishonesty was not cruelty but fear, for the city feared to say that the old world had gone.

1:3 ¶ And she came to the place she remembered best, and it was changed; and she came to the place she had feared, and it was ordinary; and she stood between the two and found that memory is faithful and not exact, and that the difference is the whole of the returning. And the elder word standeth for the one who remembers Zion: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

1:4 ¶ And the book confesseth: return is not restoration. The city returneth changed, and the beloved returneth scarred, and the beloved things that do not return at all are carried in the record as truly lost; and this confession is the whole of the road home, and it is a road and not a wall.

2:1 ¶ And the keepers of the city offered her the comfortable version; and they said, The rooms stand as they stood, and the songs are sung as they were sung, and nothing was lost. And the woman walked into the rooms, and the rooms were not as they stood; and she heard the songs, and the tunes had shifted, and the words of one verse were gone; and she stood still in the doorway.

2:2 ¶ And one keeper grew angry and said, The city cannot afford the truth while it rebuildeth; let the comfort stand until the walls are up, and the truth wait. And the woman said, I did not come home to a city that waiteth for me; I came home to a city I must meet, and it must meet me. And the keeper was silent, for he had never thought of the meeting.

2:3 ¶ And the woman began to fear her own memory; for the city said the old rooms stood, and her memory said otherwise, and she had come a long road alone and could not prove her own heart to it. And she saw that the comfortable version was the kindest thing the city had to offer, and that its kindness was a thief, and the thief is the comfort of the lie.

2:4 ¶ And the book confesseth the mercy that rode with this judgment: the city's keepers were not enemies of the returning; they were guardians of the city's hope, and their comfort was the armor of their own wound; and the lie they told to the woman they had told first to themselves. For the record of the breach is kept by the house itself, and the house knoweth: grief that pretendeth not to be, standeth not.

3:1 ¶ And a friend came to her from the years between, and there was a scar upon the friend's face, and the woman greeted the scar before the face; and the greeting was the honest welcome, and the friend did not explain the scar, and the woman did not ask. And they sat together in the room that was not as it was, and the room held them both.

3:2 ¶ And the woman said, I remember the room as it was, and the room is not as it was, and I will keep the room I remember in my own keeping, for it cannot be rebuilt to order; and the room that standeth I will keep also, for it is the room that is. And the two keepings are one keeping, and the holding of them together is the hard road.

3:3 ¶ And the beloved things that did not return were named plainly in the book's own voice, and the naming was the whole of what could be done: a mother, and a brother, and a house, and a song whose last verse none remembereth. And the book writeth them as lost and not as absent, for the loss is the truth of them, and the truth is the mercy; and the dead are never deleted from the book.

3:4 ¶ And the book confesseth the mercies that are new every morning, and it confesseth their limit also: the mercy is new, and the broken is not restored thereby; the former things may pass away, and every tear be wiped, and still the tears are real while they fall. For it is written, They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness; and it is written also, God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And the book holdeth both, and refuseth neither.

4:2 ¶ And the woman sat in the room that was not as it was, and decided to live in the city that is; and she kept the key to the old room upon its nail, and did not throw it away, and did not use it to reopen what the years had closed. And the elder text hath the word for her resolve: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; and the word was spoken first to a daughter on a road, and the woman spake it to her city.

4:3 ¶ And this is the charge of the book, given to them that return and to them that receive the returning: keep the record honestly, and mark the lost as lost, and the altered as altered; and when thou seest a scar, greet the scar before the face, and ask not the cause; and leave the door ajar for the one who cometh later, who shall find a city changed again, and shall need the honesty thou hast kept.

4:4 ¶ And the door standeth ajar at the city's edge, and the record lieth open in the city's midst; and the woman liveth in the room that is not as it was, and the room is hers. And the book saith no more of it, for the returning is not the undoing of the years, and the city that cometh home is the city that must be met, and the meeting is the whole of the promise.