<h2id="end-of-endings-2403rye-2409">End Of Endings — 2403<br>×<br>Rye — 2409</h2>
<p>Some of my readers may be wondering why it is that I know so much about The Woman. “How does she know all of this?” some might be wondering. “Does she really know all these things that The Woman did? Does she know who the kindly shop owner is? The one who pet on The Woman as she sobbed from too spicy a chili?” Others might be wondering — and rightly so! — “How much of this is actually real? Surely she does not know The Woman’s innermost thoughts! All this talk of ideas in shapes being set before her is quite silly.”</p>
<p>My answer is that tired phrase: “It is complicated.” Of course I do not know her innermost thoughts. I think it is a me thing to take abstract ideas and pretend they look like pretty baubles or hot coals or little statuettes to be placed upon a dresser. I cannot read minds, and I do not have any memories from The Woman. I do not even know quite what she is anymore! I would not know if she quit, since I am not down-tree from her — her down-tree instance is dead now, these last six decades, remember — and I do not believe she merged cross-tree with anyone except perhaps Ashes Denote That Fire Was, who is building in themself a gestalt of the clade as best they can. No, I do not know anything so intimate.</p>
<p>What I do have, though, is a story. I have the story I learned from The Woman’s Friend and Therapist and Cocladist and Lover, the one I learned from The Blue Fairy and The Child and The Musician and My Friend. I have all of that story that I learned, and I have that story that I lived.</p>
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<p>One day — I remember it being quite a warm one, though every sim has different weather, and we as a clade are not all that keen on cold — one day, The Woman came to me.</p>
<p>“Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars,” she said as she stood before my door, looking much the same as I do — though it bears repeating that she was <em>quite</em> stylish, and I promise you, friends, I am <em>not;</em> she wore a simple outfit of shifting colors that caught the eye without dazzling, one that made her look supremely comfortable as herself, and me? I wore a t-shirt and pajama pants! “I was pointed your way by Praiseworthy. Do you have a moment to speak?”</p>
<p>Readers, I do not think I need to tell you that I was caught off-guard by this! I had never met The Woman before, though I had certainly seen her once or twice. There were functions, yes? And perhaps she came to one of my readings or two, and certainly she was there, that day on the field as we watched Michelle who was also Sasha give herself up to the world and become one with the heart that perhaps beats at some imagined center of the System. The most recent time I had seen her, though, was in some unreadable and thus unwritable mood as some few dozen of us gathered on the first of what some are now calling <em>HaShichzur,</em> the day that Lagrange was restored after the Century Attack.</p>
