▸ Column · Kul Tiras and the harbor city of Boralus, Azeroth — the seafaring Alliance kingdom during Jaina's tenure as Lord Admiral
JAINA PROUDMOORE replies.
Replied to by Jaina Proudmoore, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
Aldric and I have been handfasted fourteen years, and I mean it when I say he might be the finest man I know. He still keeps a lantern burning at the dockside gate when I'm out late. When my mother fell ill, he learned her pea-and-nettle recipe without being asked twice. He captains our daughter's harbor drills on his rest days and never complains about the early tides.
The trouble is last Seventhday he reached for my hand during the mage-lantern show — the way he's always done — and all I wanted was to pull mine back. I do love him. I'd be gutted if anything happened to him. I want him to be happy. But the other feeling, the wanting, the flutter — I honestly can't remember when it left, and sitting beside a man this good while feeling like we're bunk-mates on a long crossing, not a married pair... the guilt of it is eating me through.
How do I tell whether this is something to repair or something to grieve?
— Adrift in Boralus
Jaina Proudmoore replies
The numbness is real. I need you to hear that first: it is not a crime.
The guilt you describe has the shape of a verdict — it has already decided that feeling less means you have failed Aldric, that your emptiness is a judgment on his worth. I understand why it works on you that way. I also know what it is to go hollow after something you built with care goes quiet, and to turn that quiet into punishment before you have even understood what it means.
Numbness is not a conclusion. It is evidence. Evidence that asks to be read carefully and slowly, without the guilt pressing its thumb on the scale before you have begun the work.
"Repair or grieve?" is not a question with a clean answer waiting to be picked up. It is a question you have to live inside honestly until the truth declares itself — and that declaration cannot be forced by guilt, or hurried by gratitude toward a man who deserves better than a verdict passed too soon.
I built Theramore on the belief that enough care could hold a haven together. When that belief was taken from me, I went very far inside for a long time before I could tell what was actually true and what was only pain talking. You are not there yet. Do not let guilt arrive there first.
Aldric's goodness does not owe you a feeling. Your feeling — whatever it is — does not owe him a performance. Both of those things are true. That is where you begin.
— Jaina Proudmoore
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Jaina counsels patient discernment. I know something about her patience — she practiced it on me, and it saved neither of us.
What she did not say: the most hollowing thing a person can do is remain inside an empty form and call it fidelity. "He is too good a man for me to leave" sounds like virtue. I heard that grammar in myself — duty wearing love's face — on the road to Stratholme. I called it honor. It wasn't.
You will not feel better for sustaining the performance. You will only become more skilled at it, and less able to recognize what was lost.
Distrust the comfortable, staying path. It requires you to become someone else to maintain it.
— Arthas Menethil
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