Work Text:
Here in the Tower, lanterns hang like small answers. People trade masks and candy under the old stone; a Titan crouches and pours sweets into a hatchling’s hands. The noise is ordinary - laughing, bartering, someone calling a joke - and it hits me like a ledger I can’t close. Festival of the Lost. The name sits on me and I map what it means: faces gone, rooms emptied, a past that should be catalogued and shelved.
A porchlight. My hand in a pillowcase, pockets shaking with corn and penny candy. My mother smoothing the cheap elastic of a mask and saying, be careful. The memory is not warm so much as exact: the scrape of cheap plastic, the way breath fogged the street, the smell of frying oil on a neighbor’s stoop. I am small, fast, sure there is nothing to fear except running out of night.
Back at the Tower, a child offers me a paper ghost. I take it because refusing would be odd, and because the act is the same as every other act in both of my calendars: give a thing, take a grin. I taste candied apple; it is bright, almost cruel. The sweetness does what the name “lost” cannot: it ties two evenings together by a single sensation.
The flashes are not neat. Chatter from a party folds into a vendor sharing a story about a Guardian; a July patio and a Last City courtyard occupy the same mental square. The pattern is simple: costume, story, some small shared defiance against what vanishes. Ritual repeats. That repetition is a bridge.
Sadness loosens when I stop expecting a single timeline to hold all the proofs. Lost is accurate, but not absolute. I can stand here with Eva’s lanterns overhead and still carry the boy who ran between porches. The Tower does not cancel my past; my past does not make me leave the Tower. I will be both. I will let the festivals stack: one memory layered on another, each one alive when I call it. The permission feels small and enough.