How is it possible that you were ever really here, Vati? When you are so completely gone now. How is that possible?

After you died and we couldn't stop weeping, I told Rose Red that I felt as though I were washing the color of your thread out of the tapestry of my life. (Not terribly poetic, I know, but then we both know how abysmal my poetry tends to be.) That thread is still there, woven into my memories and the very fabric of my self, but the living color of it is gone. And sometimes I can't remember what it was like when it glowed and moved.

How can I be this self and that self, too? Trying to understand how they can both exist in one person, in one life, is as impossible as trying to comprehend infinity. I know how infinity works, and I know that I am both this person and the person I used to be, but I don't understand either of these things.

To me, to each of me, you are both Never-Were and Always-Are.