by Mindi Meltz
Coyote rises on his haunches and cocks his head. The whole circle is silent, and Lonely can tell that the word “fight” surprises them, as it does her. She realizes how much, through holding this Council, she has longed to understand Sky—and how irretrievably he seems to travel, moment by moment, away from her understanding.
“I mean,” says Sky, “that I want to understand, from what all of you have to say, what we can teach the humans that will change the course of this suffering they cause. I go into their dreams. What can I teach them?”
“What about what they can teach you?” says Lonely, frustrated and hurt because it seems to her that he would rather she not speak at all.
“You don’t know what it’s like in the City,” he tells her again. “You don’t know what’s happened there.”
“But I know that I’m human. And so are you. So you should stop being afraid of it, because we’re good humans. We don’t have to hate ourselves so much.” Lonely feels tears bleeding from her eyes into the lake. She covers her face in her hands. Her heart feels sore and strained, and she almost forgets the presence of the animals.
“It’s not that simple,” Sky grumbles. “We can call ourselves good, but we have as much selfishness as the rest of them.”
I’m not selfish, cries Lonely alone inside her mind, thinking she hears what he doesn’t say. I’m not selfish for loving you. And it’s not selfish if you love me.
Suddenly the wolf throws back his head and howls. It’s a long, round, wailing howl, arched like the waning moon. For it will wane again, after tonight. Lonely knows now. The moon will lose her child, again and again, and it will never stop. Now the coyote joins in, his voice leaping and hysterical, at once exaggerating and seeming to mock the sad call of the wolf.
Lonely wants to be silent with the others and listen to those dark sounds and the truth they call up within. But she cannot. She says, “Sky, you have to look at yourself. You have to look inside and see what’s frightening you, before you can expect humans to understand the dreams you give them. Otherwise they will only be nightmares.”
“Stop,” he hisses, speaking only to her. “You’re ruining this. It’s not about me.”
“I won’t stop!” she cries. “If you know so much, why aren’t the dreams working? Why does nobody hear you?”
He doesn’t answer her, but everything turns wrong. The animals begin to move and twist around her, and then slowly fade. They are breaking the circle. They are rising up above the water. Sky looks at her as he has never looked at her before.
“Look what you’ve done,” he says.
“No,” Lonely whispers, her tears meaningless inside the huge water of the lake. “Not me.”
They are alone now in the eerie darkness, and then Sky turns and rises toward the sun. She, too, turns, and chases after him, waving her arms and kicking her legs. She doesn’t see the white birds anywhere. She follows him to the shore, where he stands shaking himself like an animal.
“Sky, it wasn’t my fault,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, turning on her. “It was! You burst in with your questions and tried to make it all about you, and me, and what you want from me. You made a chaos of the Circle.”
“Only because you had some idea of how it had to go, that you never talked to me about! You think you’re the only one who knows. It was supposed to be both of us. I was supposed to be part of this. What did you want from me? What did you want to come of this?”
“Not that.” Sky storms up onto the land, and then he turns back to her one more time.
“You were the one who insisted we do this,” he says, “even though the trees said we weren’t ready. And we weren’t. Now we’ve brought only more confusion.”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who’s not ready. You won’t look within yourself. You won’t surrender to this.”
“To what? What do you think this is about, Lonely? This isn’t about your loneliness. The whole world is at stake. Don’t you get that?”
Yes, thinks Lonely, as she stops herself from reaching out to him—and then watches him go.
She turns and sits down on the earth. Every single animal is gone, for as far as she can see. She curls up. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. But inside she thinks, You said everyone in the circle was safe to speak as they would, to say what they had to say. But you didn’t mean me. I could not say what I had to say in the space you made. I was not safe.
All that remains here is the humble quietude of the Earth. It is so deep and sure beneath her bones, and yet it took so long to become what it is. Under the water, in that magical confluence of realities, the animals and humans could all understand each other—could, for a short time, speak the same language. But how could that ever happen in the real, complex world, where each being lives its long-ago predetermined existence, only gradually changing over millions of years? She thinks of Fawn. Of her fear.
The night comes over her and grows cold. Lonely thinks, What if the old hag on the island is my mother after all? What if loneliness is in my blood? What if there is a darkness inside me that Sky can’t see, but that little by little is pushing him away forever….
Then the Earth speaks to her, and it says to her body, I forgive you. And in this moment, the Earth is Lonely’s mother, soothing and rocking her in a rhythm she never embraced until now. Lonely never noticed before that the Earth was even moving. It is carrying her, like a mother whose softness is endless, and yet at the same time tired. Who is sometimes warm and rich, and sometimes cold and dry, but who has never left her. Who rises beneath and around her, singing in the wind and the sun.
Maybe you are my only mother, she says to the Earth, and in answer it seems to take her in, and she loses herself for one moment inside that womb where everything began. For one blessed moment, she allows herself to forget that she is human. She leaves her consciousness behind in a molten, loamy paradise in which ferns and dragonflies, eagles and mammals, crabs and horses and trees all dream their futures and remember their pasts and surge upward again and again into the hope and futility of life.
Then she lifts her head as the moon rises, and she tries not to remember who she is.
The moon is waning.
Lonely has learned to watch it happen. She wants to understand the curse the old woman made: how the moon loses its child, and where it goes. At night when she can’t sleep, she stares at the darkness where a piece of the moon was, trying to see behind it.
I’m still here, the moon seems to whisper. And Lonely knows now that it will keep coming back.
But Sky doesn’t come back.
The days and nights pass in a haze of misery. She doesn’t know where she goes or what she does. She wants to run away, wants to leave this place, leave this life, leave everything. Yet where would she go? This pain will follow her everywhere. She can never escape it.
In seven more of those dark moons, she will have to answer the old woman’s question. What is the proof of love?
But the voice of her father, even in memory, is stronger.
Lost, he used to say into his helpless hands. Lost.
7th MOON
What happened to the animals when the Council broke apart? Lonely doesn’t know, and in the days of Sky’s absence that follow it, she speaks to none of them. When there is pain and distance between her and Sky, it seems that the world, too, must be broken apart from itself, and whether from guilt or from anguish, she cannot bear to engage with it.
Yet as time passes, the animals begin to come near her again. Ravens converse over her head, but she cannot understand them. A butterfly alights on her arm and travels with her for half of one morning as she walks over river stones, though if he is speaking, she cannot hear him. Sometimes when she lies for a long time in a thicket or a field, unable to move, rabbits feed close to her, or songbirds peck near her feet. Their presence comforts her, and ye
t she no longer seems able to remember how to communicate with them.
She spends one whole day yelling at the sky.
Other days she only wanders.
She decides that pain, though it feels at first like a live beast moving animatedly within the soul, is actually—when she focuses in on it—an absence of something. Like her very first feeling of absence, after her father stopped coming to the tower, only more acute. There is a nothingness inside her that over time has taken on its own energy, has begun to open wide, has begun to burn.
She loses track of the days. The meadow that she turned to summer begins to show signs of dying, and then another snow falls and covers the flowers. But on the day after that snow, she finds the footprints of his bare god feet, which cannot be harmed by the cold. They spiral slowly toward the center of the field, where he and Lonely lay that morning, and kissed each other in wonder. There in the center, she can see where he sat down, and then lay, in the snow. She follows the spiral back out to where he left it, and to where his human prints become the four thin lines of bird prints, and to where those prints end at the bare peaks of stone where he took off and flew.
But it gives her hope. She comes to the meadow often, hoping he will come again. Once, on a warmer day that melts the earth, she also finds his footprints at the edge of the lake, in the mud. She never saw his footprints before these two occasions, and she wonders what they mean. Perhaps he never wandered about in human form before, unless he was with her. And she even has the strange thought that somehow he is trying to find her again, but is lost in some other reality and doesn’t remember how to get back to her.
At sunset on the new moon, she arrives at the edge of the lake and considers going in. She hasn’t, all this time, because she cannot imagine that she belongs there. The more she has thought on what happened, the more she has felt that the ending of the Council was her fault after all, that she was selfish with her questions and the things she wanted to know. Yet she feels, still, that the lake is where the only answers lie.
The white birds have not spoken to her, nor acknowledged her in any way that she can tell. Now they float in different directions around the lake, without any apparent purpose, restful and quiet. She sits at the edge where once she watched the animals drink, and thinks back on the story of her love. How she crossed the sea and the fields and the desert, and climbed the mountains in search of him. What was I searching for all that time? she asks herself. I still don’t even know who he is.
She tries to think where they went wrong. She remembers the way he trembled beside her, and then pulled her so sweetly and so violently to him on that first evening alone together in the sky. She remembers how he carried her into clouds, how he spoke of the moon—the first words he had spoken in perhaps a hundred years. She remembers how he kissed her each time he returned from dreams; she remembers how each time his face betrayed a longing—a need and a fear of needing, equal to hers—that in the midst of all her own fear she discounted, not trusting that it was enough.
“Sky!” she calls into the abyss over the lake, and it is the first time since he left her that she has actually called his name again. She was afraid of the pain of it. “Come back,” she says more quietly. “I’m sorry. Can we start again?”
“Sky!” But the very word mocks her: not the name of a real man or boy, but the name of the whole universe, untouchable and vague. She stands up, shaking in that echo, and she can feel the weight of her own skin.
She throws a little stone into the water, to make something happen. And she stands there until the ripples have completely disappeared. In that time, the water calms her a little. It is old, and held perfectly still within the confident confines of the ancient stone. The water reflects each cloud, one by one as they pass over, and it reflects Lonely’s face, and in the end the water is innocent; it only shows what is, without decision or judgment. This innocence touches Lonely. She feels the sincerity of her beloved inside it. She sees that he is only the mirror of her dream—someone trying to be more perfect than is human or possible, who loves her but is always just a little further than she can reach. Whatever he is, he only reflects her own loneliness; he reflects her question; he reflects her fear.
Now she lifts her face, and all the way out across the lake, all the way on the other side of the water, she can see Sky, standing there looking back at her. She wonders at first if it’s a dream, for though he has told her there is no difference, there is a difference to her. She needs him to be real. But when he steps into the water and begins walking toward her, she knows that he is.
She does the same. She doesn’t know what will happen, or how long it will take them to reach each other, or if they will be able to survive going down into it the way they did the day of the Council. The water pumps like a heart against her legs. The earth beneath the water sinks under her feet like fur. The white birds that she passes part away from her, like curtains opening. Sometimes he looks down as he walks, and sometimes he looks right at her. Sometimes he slows his pace, and sometimes he seems to hurry. Of her own pace, Lonely knows nothing. She can hardly feel her own body.
It seems to take forever. As they come closer, Lonely imagines every emotion he might be feeling—anger, loneliness, longing, joy—and feels sick with the anxiety of not knowing and of wanting. When she can see his face, he gives her his sad little smile, and she can’t breathe.
They reach the center of the lake, but still the water reaches only to their ribs. Not looking at her, Sky reaches for her hand; when she takes his, she feels a jolt as if she touched the sun.
“It isn’t deep now,” is all she can think to say.
“It is deep, though,” says Sky. “Deeper than we know.”
Something about the word “we” moves her. She can see the emotion in his body—in the tension of his jaw, his shoulders curving in toward her—emotion like muscles rippling beneath smooth skin. Later she will remember this moment and wish she’d had time to trace every ripple with her fingers, exploring and coaxing into passion each fragile expression of his heart. She sees at once his strength and his helplessness. She sees the light of what he knows and the shadow of what he does not know.
She gives him her other hand.
“I came here looking for you,” he says.
She nods, still not quite able to take a full breath.
“It took me a long time to come back here,” he says, “because I was afraid.”
“But you could have met me somewhere else. I am not always here.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “What I fear here, it is the same thing I fear in you. It’s the same. I had to come here to the water, to face it. I can’t explain.”
She smiles now. “But you always explain everything to me.”
He smiles too, but his look is stark and unsteady. “What do you want, Lonely?”
“I want to know you.”
“Why?”
“How can you ask?”
“Because there is more to me that you don’t see. When the City destroyed my home, I fought— So much happened. I still have strange feelings in me, feelings I don’t want you to see.”
“You don’t want me to know you.”
“No, it’s only that I’m afraid to be needed. I can’t trust myself.”
“Or maybe,” says Lonely, “you’re afraid of needing me.”
“Yes. That’s true, too.”
She holds her breath. But she can’t hold it forever. She can’t hold it for him.
“Why?”
He looks down. “I fought for love once before, Lonely,” he whispers. “I fought for it, and I failed. I was foolish. I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?” she whispers back, touching his face with her hand. “What happened?”
He turns his face, not toward her eyes, but into her hand, brushing it with his lips, and he keeps his eyes closed.
“I’ve lost so much, Lonely. I’m afraid to love! And if I’m afraid of that, how can I help anyone?”
She thinks suddenly, That is why my name is Lonely. Not for suffering, and not to separate me—but so that someone else can look at me to find a mirror for his own loneliness and see it for the first time. Because only I can reach him. Only I can touch him.
She won’t remember later who first reached for whom, or how their bodies became once again entwined, their arms making a circle that surrounded them. She thinks that later, later, they will have time for all her questions to finally be answered. For now they only hold each other forever. And yes, there is such a thing as forever: the happy ending that stops the pain of the story and fills up the rest of eternity with its even peace. Even though the story will continue to unfold, as if unrolling down the other side of the mountain, where everything is different now, and loneliness lives again in new and different forms, and the humble details of life continue their slow excruciating march into nothingness—even so, in that godlike place where humanity can hold infinity (call it dreams, call it memory, call it soul), that happy ending extends on another plane crossing this one into forever. She will always know that this moment was forever, just like every other moment when everything changed. A moment between worlds, between eras, a moment of no-time. A moment when she lost herself, when she died, when a greater hand than her own dipped her for a moment into a nothingness that was not loneliness but pure bliss.
“I missed you,” he whispers into her shoulder. “I love you.”
She believes him.
The lake calls all the light out of the sky, bit by bit, and swallows it into darkness. The new moon rises unseen. Still, Sky does not leave.
They keep holding each other, and sometimes she feels her own body, and sometimes she feels his, and sometimes she is thinking and other times only feeling. She feels the water pulse against her skin, amazing. She feels their hands—the hands that reach and grasp and mold—forget themselves in the larger embrace of arms, of hearts blurring together. She feels the moonlight in their lips as they lean away, making space for love to glow, and kiss. From the moment his tongue first begins its exploration of her own, she knows he will stay with her all night.