Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She remembers again the mist of heat rising from his chest as he leaned over her, his breath in her ear, his hand trying to break into the chambers of her deepest longing. She did want him. She did. But.

  What is this desire, fleeing into so many hidden places inside her, and where does it begin? Why did her need for Dragon—and his need for her—hurt?

  Crawling on her hands and knees within the endless maze of her own mind, she is not even aware for a long time that she has stopped, and that the horse has stopped, and that they are staring at a wall of water that blocks their way. Before her, water is falling and falling, losing itself in the speed of its falling, in the loss of stone or soil or anything to hold it in shape. It roars in this wild loss of shape, in this falling. Her horse stands still and they contemplate the waterfall together, this tower of falling. It rises up from the river, up a brown cliff, at the top of which the deep forest begins, that deep green ache of life. In its falling—pulling apart from itself, its molecules flying alone in the air—the water becomes white, like pure spirit.

  But the cliffs on either side are so steep, they will never be able to climb them. They will have to wander along the edge of the desert, searching for a way up, to continue onward toward that white-tipped mountain that Lonely only half believes in now. And she does not want to leave the water, for again it reminds her of Yora, whose memory still comforts her like nothing else she has ever encountered. While her horse wanders carefully down the terraces of stone to find a drink in the pools below the falls, Lonely sits in the sun and pulls her knees up to her chest. She watches the water fall, watches it forget itself, giving itself up to the air. As if water could fly.

  When Dragon first touched her, he spoke to something inside her that she had no words for. Something she could handle when it stayed inside her own body but that, once it reached out to his, terrified her. He drew it forth like magic. He told her she was beautiful and perfect, and he loved her for that beauty, as her father had. So why did it frighten her? Why had she felt so lost in the face of this love he professed; why had she seemed to watch her own body as if from a great distance as he touched it? Who was she then, and where? Wherever she was, confused and lost, was a foggy place where he could not find her. And yet his caresses trapped her there, in a cage of his own fascination, and she paced inside herself, crying out and afraid, like the days and nights she paced in the tower. She felt an agony of hunger that he could not answer. He brought it forth and then stopped it with his desperate hands. Maybe this boy, like her father, was a magician. But was he the one? Was he the one who could rescue her?

  She watches the water, curving into a nearly straight line downward, and tries to follow the individual speeding droplets with her eyes, though they dissolve like powder. There is a meditation in watching the water fall, like watching fire. After sitting there for a long time, spilling her thoughts desperately into the river, she closes her eyes, and the roar of the falls encases her mind, and she begins to hear music inside that great white sound. She has never heard music before, and yet she seems to recognize it. Her tears fall over her knees, down her neck and legs, her body wet and crying, her body itself a waterfall backward into memory, whose untranslated story is so much longer and more complicated than birdsong.

  Does she stand and walk toward the dark space behind the falls, or does he walk through the shining water to meet her? Later, she will not remember. He lowers his flute and smiles at her. His black hair hides his laughing eyes, shining as if with water, but he does not look wet.

  “Hey,” he says. “You look so sad.”

  Lonely touches her own face, speechless. The unknown boy’s face is smooth and sweet, like a girl’s, and his naked chest is soft. He is wearing a skirt made of colors that keep shifting and falling, and he does not frighten her at all.

  “I was sitting there behind the falls,” he continues, “feeling sorry for myself, feeling bad about myself. And then I saw that you were doing the same! But you, girl, have no need to feel bad. You have been following your heart, after all.”

  “But he might have been the one,” says Lonely, as if the boy will know what she means, which he seems to.

  “But do you love him?” he asks.

  Lonely cocks her head, and the sound of the water is suddenly fresh and clear, each drop of water a separate, intimate stripe of sound.

  “No,” she says, and then she knows it is true. The thought is emerging already though she tries to stop it, tries not to expect anything: Maybe all of that… was only leading to this…

  “My name is Moon,” says the boy, and takes both of her hands in his. “I am a rain god.” When he says that, his body seems to leap into fragments of light, the way the waterfall explodes into particles of brilliant white while still remaining itself, not becoming anything less wonderful than water.

  “Oh!” she cries. “What does it mean, then, to be a god? You can tell me.” Why did she never ask Dragon? She was afraid somehow. She was afraid he would not know. But this boy will know. “What does it mean? Are we not supposed to feel?”

  But the boy turns away, and the motions of his face make her heart hurt. He looks to a place in the falling water that she cannot see. “No,” he says quietly, “we must feel, or all the power we are given as gods goes to waste.”

  “What power?”

  He looks back at her, tenderly. “We each have our own gift.” He smiles, though the smile clearly hurts him. “Don’t you know your gift? What are you the goddess of?”

  She thinks maybe he is teasing her. But she is too full of wonder to answer. He steps toward her.

  “You’re beautiful,” she says, hope making her blush.

  The boy takes one of her hands and places it against his heart. “Thank you,” he says seriously, and his eyes look into hers with gratitude, and she feels as if her heart is a gift she can give to another—providing comfort for another in a way she did not know she was capable of, the way Yora did for her.

  Then Moon says, “Would you like to go with me up the rainbow? I can see you’re headed upward.”

  Lonely sees the rainbow now, just revealed by the sun, a wash of transparent color over the falls. She cannot stop her own smile, cannot stop the relief. His kindness. His forgiveness. His sudden appearance out of the music. Wouldn’t it make sense that love would find her here, in this great surrender of water, rather than out on the desert, harsh and bare?

  “Hold onto me,” says Moon. “It’s not as gentle as it looks.” Then he presses his body to hers and delicately wraps her in his arms.

  Immediately they collapse like thin tinder into flames of red—a bold, spitting red that burns Lonely from the inside. She can feel the cruel and shameless reality of her own blood, a tributary of the blood that fills all the life of the world. At once surrendered and starving, comforted and torn to pieces, she boils with a passion that fountains from the very loins of the earth, where life began and begins at every moment. Its fury turns her body to raw energy, and she swirls madly against the body of this other that presses to her, trying with her whole being to devour him, to make them one.

  Then they are gathered and focused into a pulsing womb of orange, where the fury cools to a simmering pleasure, and Lonely rolls against the boy’s body, each of her cells coming loose in a frothing wave of touch. Her mouth licks and sucks; her hands grope and fondle. The orange focuses the red tighter and tighter until she cries out in an extreme of ecstasy—her body too much for itself—and then they are both released into a flood of yellow.

  Yellow expands in fields around them, and they fly, and they are children, laughing like the sun. Love is joy, is hope everlasting, is everything sweet and palpitating with wonder. Lonely feels she can climb any mountain; the light opens her so that all things are clear and easy to her, and courage is only a clear shining of the self forward with no holding back, no hiding or denying. Lonely and the boy hold hands, pressin
g their hearts up into the sky, and the sky opens its light to them: waves and waves of unbelievable, heart-breaking light, so bright she cannot see.

  Then they wake together, relaxed in their love, in cool folds of green. They nurse their life from the green and the green grows up around them, all of life opening for them and pouring forth its sustenance. They eat of the green and it turns their bodies silent and strong, and their bodies lift deep breaths from their roots. Slowly, Lonely turns to the boy, and her look is luscious and sure, irresistible in its doubtless love. That love is so rich that it animates every moment of her being and her life, until she is brought to her knees by the nostalgic weight of its abundance, dying into the earth.

  Then she is crying again, and her crying is blue, and she will keep crying—again and again, throughout her life—and nothing will ever release her from this crying. The blue pours forth from her throat: a singing cry, a crying out for love and for her own life to begin. She is riding the wave of that blue singing, her feet sliding over it and under it like fish leaping from the sea, and she is singing forth her own journey, and all the creatures of the earth and sky are singing with her. Each of her movements is pure grace, like the reflection of a flame upon glass, and she is sad but the sorrow is the most beautiful thing she has even known. Finally she lies down upon that blue sorrow, and falls beneath the waves, and deeper, deeper below the blue, she sinks into indigo.

  Indigo is more beautiful than beauty, more lyrical than song, and deeper than depth. Indigo holds up the blue and all the other colors, all the falling of the waterfall. Lonely sinks into it like earth, remembering something she had forgotten, something she will forget again when she wakes. Something bigger than her love loves her. Something wider than her life holds her. She sees the whole story of her journey, from the tower through the ocean through the fields, from the fields into the desert, from the desert up the waterfall and into the green mountains, and from the green mountains dreaming up to the high blue mountain of truth, and back down the river all the way back to the sea, under the tower, under the island, to where indigo traces the meaning of all life in a terrifying script of naked truth.

  Inside the indigo, Lonely is nothing but a churning of raw spirit, her yearning deepening into the purer longing of her spirit to be devoured by its own original fire. There at the brink of violet, where indigo turns its face again toward red, Lonely brightens into her own body again, as if that earthly form is the most perfect form her spirit could take. She finds herself in a chamber of indescribable peace and low flickering colors—all the colors of the rainbow and every shade in between.

  Her head rests in Moon’s lap. Moon’s fingers glide along her scalp like cool streams, stretching out the strands of yellow and spreading them behind her.

  “Your hair is so bright,” he says in his singing, laughing voice. “I can tell you are going up toward the sun.”

  “Are we at the end of the rainbow?” asks Lonely weakly.

  “No,” says Moon solemnly, for his expressions seem to flicker between any and every emotion without notice or reason, fickle as images upon water. She does not understand why he looks sad now when he says, “The rainbow has no end. It is a circle, and you can only see the part that rises above the earth. We’re in the center of the rainbow now, where purple turns to light.”

  Lonely’s eyes swim in that light, which seems to glow brighter all around them as he speaks, and she searches its infinity for her own voice. “I want to do it again,” she breathes.

  Moon laughs. “The path of colors? Girl, you will do it again. Again and again and again, until you can hardly bear it. That’s what life is. Just try to remember it’s a circle, and you are immortal, and you can always come here, to the center, to rest.”

  Then he bends down and kisses her on the lips, and his lips burn with softness, sweeter than the first rays of morning or the first caress of sleep, as different from Dragon’s thick passion as the moon is from the sun. Lonely rises up after him, following his lips and opening her eyes, wanting. But he smiles down at her with an easy calm and will not kiss her again.

  She feels an ache that is familiar somehow, as if she expected this. A cold stone in her heart. It will be this way again and again. She will keep finding the god, and he will keep leaving her, forever.

  “You don’t want me,” she says to him. “You don’t love me.”

  “No! It’s you who doesn’t want me. You must ask yourself what you want! Don’t forget. Don’t say it is someone else who made the choice you were afraid to make yourself. You know, if you keep giving your choices away to others—waiting for the ones you don’t want to push you away first—someday you won’t own your choices any more. Then, when you want to make a wish come true, you won’t be able to.”

  Lonely looks at him, both sad and afraid. She knows that what he says is true—he isn’t the one, and she knew it from the first—but this truth does not help her. She wants to stay inside his touch. She wants the simple assurance of Dragon’s hungry eyes again, his hand moving up her thigh, making her forget. The colors are all fading, and she can hear the water falling.

  “Don’t worry,” says Moon, “Keep on your journey. When we were sitting there at the river, both of us feeling bad about ourselves, both of us greedy with our sorrow, I looked at you and remembered someone I love who needs me. I realized how selfish we are when we deny ourselves like that. I mean, we can go on denying ourselves if we want to, but not if it keeps us from being there for the people who love us.”

  “But no one loves me,” says Lonely.

  “Your horse loves you,” says Moon, “for example.”

  “My horse!” cries Lonely, though her feelings are still slowed by the strange, deep place she’s in, her thoughts halted with wonder and the exhaustion of color. “I left him behind again.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Moon again, beginning to fade from her the way Yora did once, trailing away like tears. “I think that horse knows how to find her own way, anywhere you go.”

  But is the horse a girl? Lonely isn’t sure now, and as she wonders, Moon disappears, and she wakes in a furry drapery of green moss under cool trees, with the sound of the water falling away below her.

  It’s not the time of year for rain, and the flash flood on the full moon moved Delilah with some feeling she wasn’t expecting—something like sadness. The way the red clay smelled, that aching scent of lost wildness. She still thinks of it.

  She’s dreaming of rain the day Moon slips in, a rivulet of water through an invisible crack in the cave. He takes his human form and curls up beside her, shoving his body playfully inside the curve of hers, forcing her clenched fetal position open so that she is holding him in her arms before she even knows what’s happening.

  It’s a testament to her love for him that she recognizes him even in her sleep, because she doesn’t automatically reach for her knife or her boar tusk but only whines a little, nuzzling her face into his neck. When she wakes, he is laughing. She cries out and then gives him a shove. “You’re late.”

  “Don’t be angry, Lil,” he pleads instantly, the love he felt for her momentarily shrinking back. Her anger is unbearable to him. If she is angry, he will leave.

  But she softens right away, and wraps herself back around him. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was only afraid. I worry about you, all the time.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he whispers. She sighs, and he knows she wants to ask him all those difficult questions. He pulls away from her just enough to see her face, and flashes her his best smile.

  To his relief, she smiles back. Her eyes are feverish, as always, and they dazzle him; her smile is almost painful to look at in her raw face.

  “Who’s that handsome sun god I saw on my way?” he teases. “You must not have fucked him. He didn’t have that blissed-out look they usually have.”

  “Oh,” says Lil, looking inward, her brows clen
ching a little. “Was he leaving finally?” But something in her tone is unclear. He can’t tell which answer she’s hoping for.

  “I don’t know,” says Moon. “Maybe. I think he was headed somewhere, back toward the mountains.”

  “Mm,” says Lil. “Anyway, that was Dragon. He’s sad over this little half-goddess girl who came through here. You know, they were both half-god so they had all that expectation of each other: the whole idealizing, be-my-god-to-raise-me-up-beyond-my-humanness thing.” She smiles at him again. “I’ve had a lot of visitors lately.”

  “I met her,” says Moon, the pain of that frail, childish beauty twisting him up inside for a moment, “on my way down the waterfall. She was sad too.”

  Lil twists a little in his arms, sucks in her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “New moon. Cramps. They last for days now.” Her voice is tight.

  Moon turns her over so that he can curl around her from behind, and places his hands over her belly. With the round spirit of water whirling from his hands, he smooths and caresses her womb, asking it to relax, to be at peace in the great flow of life and death. He feels her body slacken a little against him, her breathing relax.

  “What else?” he whispers.

  “Everything,” Delilah whispers back. “Moon, I’m so scared. What’s happening to me? Am I dying?”

  “Shh,” Moon says. “Tell me what hurts.”

  “My shoulders,” she murmurs, as if still half-sleeping. “Back. Stomach sometimes. Get headaches sometimes. Tired all the time. Weak. Cramps in my legs. Can’t eat sometimes. Feel sick.”