Chapter Thirty-Nine: Following the Lights

I hated the Marshes as much as you, my dear Sam, but without our guide how could we have made it through or even made it to them? We would have been captured so much earlier and to what evil end, only my nightmares have answers for. Your words were harsh for Smeagol, but your hand was gentler for you tied him only barely tight enough. Thank you for that. I tried to save him, tried to be a light for him as you have always been a light for me, especially in dark places and I think the places he had been were darker than anyone we ever were. All the time I have spent in my own blackness has made me long for the light, though he was frightened of it.

He wasn’t even strong enough for the lembas, though perhaps with much effort he could have made himself so. We were blessed to have it ourselves as the black took me more and more and you traveled beside into it physically, though not so mentally as he and I had and were and I am so grateful for that, my Sam, so very grateful. It has allowed you to return essentially unharmed. You can resume your life. You kept your promises and have received your reward. You kept me going, held my hand, held my hope. You ‘did the job’, my friend of friends, my heart.

But I am more like the Dead Faces in the water, still so lifelike, but far gone. I have tried to come back, Sam, I have tried so hard, but I have been hurt so deeply, so very deeply. Everything inside of me has been burned away in the Fire. You did not know you saved a corpse at the Fire. I did not know it myself at first, but I have not returned to the life I had freely given up and received back with astonished joy and hope, only to see it vanish in front of me, lost in the smoke and ash.

* * *

It was worse and worse the closer we got to the Black Land, but you kept doggedly on, teaching me so much. I couldn’t abide the sight of Stinker and Slinker, didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him and he would have dead even before then had I my way, but that wouldn’t helped matters, would it? You still trusted him. You knew you would get to the Fire somehow and accepted that this was the way it would be. That’s all you wanted to do. Just get there. Get it over with so it wouldn’t keep eating you away. Even the little bit I carried it, I could hear its voice constantly. What a trial it was for you to hear that so often for so much longer. No wonder you were so weary. I was worried about food to get back but you had already accepted that you would not return. It was the getting there that worried you, not the getting back. I wept then for you, for us, as I have wept since then.

But my tears are happier ones now as I watch you at night still, getting whole again, just as I wished you fade. I can’t talk to you but in my heart, but I can see you, I can watch your lips move and say my name and I can say yours just as silently. Your hand is outstretched for mine and nothing more I would like than to hold it again like I did then on the border of the Marshes, but I can’t and I don’t even try for I would touch nothing and that would hurt too much. Still I follow your light each night I need to and I think of you when I look up at the brightest stars. For more stars are falling to earth now too - your Frodo, my Frodo, was born just last week and I saw your brightest smile that very night. Did you know, dear?