Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I know. That’s what makes it so dangerous.”

  “But I don’t know what you mean,” Lonely says, her eyes filling with tears, and he pulls her back close and holds her.

  “I love you,” he says. “I have always loved you.” Now she thinks this must be real and not a dream, for it seems that all those moons of wandering, in between the tower and here, were only a moment—between the time he woke her, and the time she truly opened her eyes.

  “How did you find me?” she asks.

  “If someone has loved you once,” he answers, “there is a path laid out for love to follow. Your father loved you once. So I followed that path he made to your heart. In the dreamworld, these things are very clear. You can see love with your eyes.”

  And she falls deep into his eyes, so deep that she can no longer see, and maybe it was a dream after all.

  For when she wakes, she is alone again.

  Never has she felt so afraid. When she woke to her father’s absence every day in the tower, she did not yet know enough to feel anything. At least she knew the place she woke to, even if it was only an illusion, for it was the only place she had ever known. Everywhere she has woken since then, she has known at least where she was, and nothing surprised her. But on this night—the night after finding her prince, the one who rescued her, the one who would take her loneliness away forever—she wakes up knowing she should not be alone but is. She is lying on a cloud, in the middle of the universe, with no way back to the earth.

  The clouds are so thick she cannot see their shapes; they hide the light of the moon.

  “Sky!” she cries blankly. “Sky!” But her voice dies into nothingness, muffled by infinity as if she screamed into a cushion.

  That night lasts forever. She curls up and sobs interminably into her knees, and her thoughts, not knowing if they wake or sleep, trip downward into the nightmares below the island, where the Witch and her father’s death await her, where she is already imprisoned and has always been imprisoned in her own loneliness. What the Witch said is true: all that she found in the great world was a trick and a dream. All that seems real now is that cold tower, that cold island, which stands hard and stubborn and terrifying at the center of her soul wherever she goes and whatever she does. It feels that way. Though yesterday it seemed gone forever, now it feels like the only thing real.

  This feeling goes on and on.

  Yet when the dawn comes, and flocks of swallows come swinging through the air and alight on taller trees below her that she did not know were there, she sees that she is much closer to the mountaintop than she knew, and she dries her eyes. Though her heart is still scared and angry and bloated with sorrow, she feels a little foolish, too. She sees that something has kept her alive through the night, and that is the insistant hope that he will return, after all. Won’t he?

  An eagle is soaring steadily beside her, and she does not know for how long it has been there. The eagle is absolutely supported by the air, and it seems to Lonely as if neither of them is moving. Its wingspan stretches almost as long as her body, and the feathers on its regal head shine as glossy as fish scales.

  we’ve been waiting for you, says the eagle, for a long time. Lonely is surprised to recognize, somehow, that it is female.

  “Where is Sky?” Lonely asks, ignoring the eagle’s statement, which she does not understand.

  he doesn’t know, says the eagle.

  Lonely puzzles on this answer, trying not to panic. The eagle continues to float calmly near her, as if she knows that Lonely has more to ask.

  “I mean,” says Lonely, “when will he come back to me?”

  call him, says the eagle. maybe he is right here.

  “But I did! And what is this place, where the river begins and the world ends? Where is here?”

  it’s the dream of a Unicorn, says the eagle. don’t you know that?

  “Then you mean it isn’t real?”

  i didn’t say so. what is “real?” Then she lifts higher, and Lonely drifts lower, and backwards, and can no longer see her. It seems the cloud is no longer beneath her, but all around her, and she feels the spongy earth now soaking through her boots, and that which was the cloud is the morning mist rising off the water and slowly dissipating.

  Other birds have joined the white birds on the water, coming from all different directions. They slide onto its surface, rooting their feet in its depths, folding their wings, resting from the weary glory of flight. They float there, their heads bowed, letting their reflections do all the work of carrying them, and each one—the gull and the tern, the swan and the heron, the duck and the pelican—moves with seamless peace among the others.

  Lonely closes her eyes and tries to remain calm. The lake feels gentle before her.

  Sky, she whispers, pleading with her whole heart. She holds out her hand, because it feels right to do so. When she opens her eyes again, it is because she feels the whisper of tiny feet against her fingertips. It is a dragonfly, and the dragonfly is him.

  She knows by the rainbow of his eyes, and his slim body, and his quickness, the way he will dart off at any moment into nothing. She falls to her knees, though the ground is wet.

  “Stay.”

  i can’t. come with me.

  So she follows the dragonfly through the mists, as he skips from the tip of one reed to the tip of another. Colors come and go through his wings, whose motion she cannot see. At first she doesn’t wonder where they’re going, only focuses her sight on his tiny form so as not to lose track of him. Space by space, his wandering path curls around the edge of the lake, following its contour, never leaving the water but never moving out over its depths.

  When he finally pauses on a stone and fans his wings slowly in one of the first morning sunbeams, she crouches before him.

  “Why won’t you be human with me again?”

  He doesn’t answer, but the wind blows softly. She feels a familiar sorrow pass like a shadow over her heart with that gust, and then it fades.

  did you know, Lonely, that we are made of air—you and me?

  The earnest plea of his voice in her mind overcomes her. She wraps her arms around her knees. She would stay here with him forever, even if he is only a tiny fleeting creature, no longer than her finger.

  “What do you mean?”

  you know what I mean. this is our element. this is why you found me here. this is why the wind talks to you, too. doesn’t it?

  “Yes! But what does it mean?”

  air is the element of dreams, of imagination. when we open our minds that way, the wind can blow right in. we can understand what it’s saying. it lifts open our hearts for us. we can understand anything, everything! we can start again in every moment, Lonely. i can become anything. there is no past to weigh us down, and no future. we are free!

  “But what does the wind tell you? Sometimes it mocks me. Sometimes it is kind, and sometimes not.” Lonely’s knees begin to ache.

  Sky laughs then. it’s like that. it’s a trickster. it’s trying to help you let go.

  Lonely notices he didn’t answer her question. But now he is gone, and so is the sunbeam, so she stands, to find him in feathery grasses a short distance away. She goes after him and he flies away again, following his flight as if a straight thin thread spanned the air wherever he wanted to go. Now she is impatient, for she felt as they paused together before that they were coming closer to each other, and that he was nearly human again. An emptiness begins to yawn inside her.

  They come to a forest of spruce on the far side of the lake, that Lonely does not remember being there. Perhaps she could not see it before through the mist. Into it Sky flies, and into it he disappears again.

  “Sky.” She breaks into a short run, but the dragonfly is gone. She stands still inside a lonely moment, and dark tunnels open before her into the woods, broken painfully by occasional sun. Somet
hing aches in that path; the spruce boughs dip low but curl hopefully at the ends, and the shadows seem to shiver in their nakedness. There is something of him there, she feels, something of his heart. So she steps forward and enters into it, feeling that strange sadness again. A shadow in a dead log becomes alive, and flits with a motion similar to the dragonfly’s between trees. She starts after it. It appears again, on the other side of the thin trail.

  follow me, says Sky. i’ll take you somewhere beautiful.

  She looks fast and glimpses the movement again: it’s a fox.

  She follows the fox, or sometimes only the echo of his image slipping between shadows, so deep into the forest she feels she could never find her way out. But nothing matters to her except reaching him. Traveling is so easy, almost as if distance did not exist. She is simply here, and then there, as in a dream.

  here, he says finally, though she can’t see him. She stands in a little valley where red, blue, and yellow flowers sprout thickly around a tiny spring. She is exhausted. She sits down in the soft needles.

  “Come to me,” she whispers. In the silence around her she feels a kind of tense yearning like she felt in the sky where he jumped—a cautious, hesitant expectancy. She knows he is there somewhere. She curls up in the bed of spruce needles, and closes her eyes.

  She wakes vaguely, soon after, to the feel of his small fox body curling against her back, lighter than grass. But before she can wake fully, the dream that held her reclaims her, and she is lost in a nightmare, where the old witch grasps both her wrists and won’t let go, her face close and laughing hideously, whining You’re human after all, and you’re alone, and she is dragging Lonely down into the space below the tower . . .

  “Shhh,” Sky is saying. “Wake up.”

  She wakes to his arms, his human face leaning over her.

  “Sky!” He has saved her, from a dream she thought she could never escape.

  He holds her away from him. “What happened? What was chasing you?”

  Now she shakes her head. She feels ashamed to tell him. She feels that, if she tells him, the whole structure of the life she has created up until this final, destined meeting—as if she has built the very mountain with her own dreams, her journey a living structure of hope—will collapse.

  “Something is haunting you,” says Sky, his forehead tense. He sighs and lies down beside her. “I know.”

  Lonely rolls toward him, props herself up on her elbows and kisses his forehead experimentally. He smiles, and the smile is clumsy and new, bigger on one side than on the other. Lonely wonders if he knows he is smiling, and if it would frighten him if he knew. He takes her hand.

  “You know so much about me,” Lonely says. “But I don’t know about you.”

  He looks back at her. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in a long time,” he says again.

  A long time has passed while she slept. The sun has almost left the clearing, and the parts of her body that he isn’t touching feel cold. The vulnerability of his prone position beneath her, his eyes calmly resting in hers, and his wordless patience as he watches thoughts pass over her face all belie the power she knows he has—to change into something else or leave her at any instant. And that surrender is sweet to her. She wonders how long he has been alone here, without human companionship—how many years or even lifetimes. She wonders if he has ever touched anyone else the way he touches her now, the way he strokes her hair in wonder.

  “Sky,” she asks, “we have known each other before, in dreams?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know about my father?”

  “Yes,” he says again, after only a moment’s hesitation.

  “I can’t believe that’s my story.”

  “Don’t be afraid of your story.”

  Hearing the acceptance in his voice, she drops down beside him, and rests her cheek on his chest. She wishes she could tell him everything—or maybe he already knows?

  “Did you know,” she asks cautiously, “that my father had a wife?”

  “Yes,” he says again, but this time his voice sounds a little tighter, or maybe she’s imagining it.

  “She’s not my mother,” she adds quickly.

  “No,” Sky says. “She couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you are bright inside, and loving. And she is not.”

  Lonely relaxes a little. “But she cursed me,” she says. “She said—” She struggles with how to say it, but she wants to say it now.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he interrupts. “Whatever it is, it’s not a real curse. Because she’s not your mother, and she has no power over you. She was jealous of your beauty. She was jealous because she knew you’d find the love she couldn’t have.”

  He turns his face toward her then, and she feels his warmth blend tenderly with hers, and she believes him. But what does he know of that old woman? Why does he speak of her that way? She has to leave those questions behind, for the sake of other questions which are more pressing now.

  “But don’t you hate me, that my father was evil?”

  “No. It’s not your fault. And your father wasn’t evil. He was only doing his part.”

  “His part of what?”

  “Of what had to happen.”

  “Why did it have to happen?”

  “We don’t know yet. Maybe someday we will know.”

  “But you sound sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you sad for?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone.”

  Lonely thinks. “Do you go into everyone’s dreams, everyone in the world? Do you make their dreams?”

  “I don’t make them. I only appear inside their dreams, in the forms of different animals, and try to guide them.”

  “Do you know the people I met on my journey here? I met a man named Dragon, and a woman my age, who was dark—Delilah.”

  “She’s your other half, your shadow, and you are hers.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she is going to complete the circle for you, somehow. It means until you recognize each other, both of you will be lost. You have to come to each other in a dream.”

  “Do you come to her dreams?”

  “No. She’s different from other people. The animals come into her dreams on their own. They trust her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she loves and understands them. Even though she doesn’t know that. She doesn’t think her love is good enough for anyone. If you ever see her in a dream, make sure to accept the love she offers. She needs you to do that.”

  “Okay. What about the man—Dragon? He frightened me.” Lonely feels so relieved to finally have someone who understands everything, who sees every part of her life with her, so that it no longer weighs anything. The more they talk, the lighter she feels.

  “He frightens himself,” says Sky of Dragon. “It’s far worse for him than for you.”

  “I wish I had loved them more. Both of them. They seemed so alone.”

  “Maybe you will one day.”

  But she doesn’t like, now, the lofty tone in his voice. “But I want to stay with you.”

  “But Lonely—we can’t hold onto this.”

  “Why? You told me—you said, let’s try. Didn’t you?” Or was that a dream?

  “But it’s hard to keep seeing each other clearly, especially when we dreamed each other so many times,” he answers, insistence in his voice. “There are other realities, or illusions, that get in our way. There are stories we are part of, that started before we were born, that can take over. I know, Lonely.”

  “But I do see you for who you are. You have the dreams of all the world in your eyes.”

  “But you want something from me.”

  Startled, Lonely props herself up on one arm. “Don’t you want som
ething from me?”

  Sky is silent. For a moment, he seems like a boy again, younger than she thought he was.

  “Don’t you?” she asks again.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s all right then.”

  But he is quiet. She wants to ask him if he belongs to her as she belongs to him, if this thing between them is certain, whatever it is.

  “Will we live up here forever together?” she asks.

  He closes his eyes, shakes his head.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I don’t know yet. I can’t imagine all that—yet.”

  “Why not?”

  He looks up at her, takes her chin in his fingertips, and smiles a little. And despite all her fear, she thinks for that moment Yes, he does love me.

  “I have to speak with my grandfathers,” he says. “Those white birds you see, those are my elders. They are wiser than I. They will know if you can stay.”

  Lonely narrows her eyes. She doesn’t like this answer, nor does she understand it. But there is nothing else she can say. So at last she asks what she has been most afraid to ask—for fear the very question will drive him away.

  “Where did you go last night?” She feels embarrassed of her own fear, the way she cried and felt so helpless.

  “I had to Dream. That’s what I do.”

  “Every night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forever?”

  He shrugs.

  “Will you come back to me in the morning?” The light is so dim. They did not see the sunset, yet already the shadows enshroud them.

  He lifts up his body and looks at her. He strokes her face. “Are you afraid?”

  She doesn’t answer, but her tears answer his touch.

  “Come,” he says. He takes her hand again, and they stand up together, brushing the spruce needles from their bodies. They begin to walk through the forest back the way they came, two humans this time, and their silence together is the sweet silence of two human lovers who recognize each other’s hearts. They seem to weigh nothing. Up here in this high world, their steps are almost silent and barely touch the earth.