Zin's Emotional Journey Upon Being Confronted with Her Exes

In the margins of the pages are a few scrawled phrases: “Ain’t that some shit?” “Men really seem to love you.” “Zinzyra’s potential is boundless.”
 
Where do I even start?
 
Vicol—no, Lovic—whoever he is now… I want to fall at his feet and beg him for his forgiveness. I want to hear words from him that what he is now will never be able to give me.
 
I can’t believe it took me so long to piece together. The effortless lockstep he fell into with me, the signals, the way he walked and held himself despite being in a different body. It’s like my mind wanted to protect me from the awareness as long as possible. But when he turned from the deer, leaving himself open to it, I knew. I overkilled the deer, by a lot. It didn’t prove as cathartic as I hoped. I just found myself wondering… if I had been who I am now, would he have lived?
 
Talking to this echo of Vicol is infuriating, and I feel like I’ve been ripped open, like every buried scrap of pain has been brought back to the surface. When I asked if he blamed me, I only braced for a yes or no. To question whether I was even there… Holly has to know that if she hadn’t intervened to tell me he brought himself back for me and that he had spoken of me… his presence would have probably rendered me utterly useless to everyone.
 
Did he hear any of the things I used to quietly whisper in the mornings, looking at the empty place at camp where he should have been? Did he see his shortswords with me, never far from my side? Does he know the mark he left on me and how desperately I miss him?
 
Why did I never seek him out on Veldorn? I saw him in the portrait in Oghma’s office. Why did I never ask The Binder more about him? Will I ever stop feeling the crushing guilt for his death? I can’t walk down that path to absolution.
 
Tears are littered over the bottom half of this page.
 
I’m afraid. What if letting any scrap of him go—even this guilt—drives him further from me? I can’t lose any more of him than I already have, even the parts that hurt. I don’t know how to let go, and I don’t think I want to learn.
 
Seksgar would not approve.
 
And then there’s Shaw.
 
I don’t know how to describe what I felt today. Shock, absolutely. I thought I had made my peace with never seeing him again. Even if we both had been recalled, though, I assumed I would be able to maintain some modicum of distance. It’s clear to me I made no such peace, if the feelings in my chest were any indication. I felt a panicky sort of giddy dread. Seeing him in front of me felt warm, familiar, nostalgic. But simultaneously it was a bucket of ice water, especially considering where we were, what we were doing, who we were with. I couldn’t see Rue, but I felt him behind me. I flashed back to the time he had asked if I ever thought about Shaw still, and I had answered honestly, that I didn’t, but I would be glad to know he was well. That hypothetical answer tucked away in a new lover’s arms in a pocket plane felt very different from that moment in the woods, though.
 
And then he hugged me, and the hug was so laughably platonic that I began to think this might be tenable after all. And then he had to go and touch my face. He set fire to every emotion at once—joy, pain, sadness, resentment, longing, worry, confusion, affection, anger. I recalled hundreds of times those same fingertips had touched my face. I relived the agony of remaining in the clearing alone after he left. I felt the dozens of moments my hope dimmed, like lanterns on a street as a lamplighter walked down and snuffed them, until I had hardened my heart to spare it from feeling any of this again. It honestly took everything in me not to step sideways into the Ethereal to get away.
 
Do I still love him? I don’t know. I still love my memories of him. But it also aches to look at him, because he left, I stayed. He was gone, and in my solitude, I changed. He faded away, and I’ve only just begun to regard the vibrancy in myself. Confronted with him now, I have so many questions. Unlike so many specters in my past, this one may speak. I hope he does not tarnish the Shaw of my past.
 
And oh my gods, Haldir. Oghma wasn’t kidding when he implied there was more. I want nothing to do with that pretentious fuck, but I doubt I’ll have the ability to opt out. It’s only occurring to me now that I will have to explain him to the party. I might die of mortification... though I do relish the ways my friends will likely seek to cut him down to size... verbally, obviously
 
I feel… surprised and relieved to notice that his name no longer brings me pain, not like it used to. I suppose I should thank Lepota for that. And Rue, and Seksgar, and Vicol, and Shaw… Haldir seems now like an artifact of a time when I was trying so desperately to be something else—shorter, slighter, blonder, meeker, more elven, more beautiful, more palatable… less Zinzyra Faer.
 
Considering them now, the three men whom I’ve fallen for throughout my life, they seem to represent a progression.
 
With Haldir, I imagined a proposal, a marriage, a coronation. Discrete events only strung together by the passage of time, in retrospect painfully absent of him. A future with no partner.
 
With Shaw, I didn’t dare live beyond the moment. Death was a constant reality, and the hierarchy placed a cause first, our partners second, and each other third, at best. It was love but no future.
 
With Rue, there’s a hazy spectrum of possibilities, but we’re stepping side by side into a future together. He’s offered me a partner and a future. We can grow together and be something greater than the sum of our parts.
 
I need to stop letting my heart live in the past. I live in the present; I live for the future. A future that will never come if we don’t win here in Teoria. I need to take a page out of Lovic’s book and maintain a singular focus on the goal. Everything else will have to wait.