Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Once, a leaf falls into her hand. I see its shape in her mind: the shape of a tree, with lines striating it in spiderweb patterns, and not green any more, but the color of dried blood. There are holes in the leaf, and places where the webbing shows through. But its shape is wavy and sure, as perfect as a human hand, like a page of something written long ago and tossed away. She is wondering about it. What the message was. She lifts her eyes, asking what she will live for now. She sees the opposite of the green land she knew: the opposite of smooth, easy love, of refreshment, of growth and lush hope. Instead, raw, ruinous fire. Passion burned to brown dust.

  “Wait!” she cries once in her delirium. “Where are you taking me? I have to stay—I have to stay up there, where I left him. He might come back. There is nowhere else for me to go.”

  I don’t know how to answer. I feel her tears. I don’t know how to tell her that the mountain that mattered so much once does not matter now. That’s not where he is.

  Yellow: more than flowers, more than bees. Red: deeper than roses, deeper than the sky at the end of the day. A festival of fire and light. But she thinks it terrible, how the wind tears the leaves down one by one. How it cannot let such beauty be. How it draws its breath and blows again, and there is more falling, and she thinks there is no mercy in the world. She hates the wind, who bore her love away from her.

  I know. It’s true, there is a cold objectivity to the wind. It does not brush her face or seem to speak to her now; it sings as if far away—in the treetops, or a field somewhere that she cannot see. But the wind is not her mother or her father, or her sister or her brother. It never promised anything.

  This will be a difficult time.

  She doesn’t know that autumn happens every year. She doesn’t know it has nothing to do with her. When she stood on the mountaintop in midsummer in her new dress, gazing up at the mountain like she knew just what would happen, it never occurred to her that the world wouldn’t always be green. But I know. If I know anything, I know I’ve done this so many times.

  Despair dulls her senses. She doesn’t see the way the leaves play together as they fall, or the laughter in their dying. Or the strength of the evergreens, whose green is rich and tight and preserved perfectly in shadow. She doesn’t breathe deeply enough to smell the rotting ripeness of the earth, and she doesn’t hear how the crows are calling all of life to attention.

  She doesn’t see how the baby firs finally get their fill of light now, now that the branches above them are bare.

  She doesn’t see the squirrels nesting, or how prepared they are for what is to come. She doesn’t know about the seeds inside the pinecones. She doesn’t know that some of the acorns the squirrels bury will be lost and forgotten in the earth, and that in that forgetting will bloom new life.

  She is only colder and colder. The old dress Chelya’s fairies made for her does not keep her warm. It seems a child’s plaything now, with no use. Now, too late, she knows what clothes are for: to protect from the pain of the air when the wind no longer loves her and her body begins to shudder deep inside.

  So she huddles close to me, and I do what I can, just by walking, just by living. Sometimes we can’t remember any more who we are or where we are going, or what we are leaving behind. Every now and then, for a moment, the glory around us tricks her into letting go of her tense heart, and she feels an incongruent flush of joy. But then it goes, leaving her confused.

  I walk and walk, and it begins to rain. It rains for days over her body, the dress hanging from it, as we slip between the trees, and it beats open her senses.

  She begins to bleed. From between her legs, where blood originally came from. Now she must surrender to a womanhood far bigger than herself. This pain, this blood—it is something she never had any control over, something she was born into, something she will die of with every darkness of the moon and be reborn to. It is the sadness in the witch’s eyes and the deep red swirls at the bottom of the dress that Chelya—a girl becoming woman—made for her. It stains me red, and it warms me. It is something that I, in my last human life, knew too well. It is the thing that killed me.

  Now you are finally human, says the rain, bleeding all around her. Now, some day, you will die.

  “Who are you?” she says to me once.

  And I just nod inside myself, feeling understood, because that is the question I ask myself with every step. Only later do I realize it was a question she wanted me to answer.

  It hurts. Delilah’s right arm.

  The arm that held back the string of the bow. The arm that reached for the fish. The arm that hurled the knife. The arm that has reached and grasped and held, over and over. But it has no strength now. There is no strength in all her body. Only pain, more powerful than life, flying faster than light from her wrist up her arm and into her shoulder, shattering her bones, erasing her mind.

  After the initial shock of it fades, the pain flickers around her hand, tugging at the nerves behind her fingers, making them curl inward. The pain there remembers pain elsewhere, so that her entire body is a network of fleeting pain messages, shooting back and forth to each other like arrows, communicating a pathway of suffering she knows so well and yet never wants to follow.

  Delilah wants only to sleep. But something from the outside hurts even more, waking her again and again.

  “It is not the wound that hurts so much,” says the cool, cloudy voice. “It is the healing that hurts. I think.”

  Delilah opens her eyes. “What are you doing to me?” she croaks. She feels like things are breaking inside her. She doesn’t know what they are. Not bones.

  The woman, Dragon’s woman, with the long, serious face, and those eyes and those lips, is bending over her. No, she is surrounding her, her body or her dress or the form of her made somehow of water, floating Delilah above the hard packed sand. This is the slow, silent flood she felt coming in that rain. It was always coming. It was inevitable.

  “I’m not doing anything to you,” the goddess says.

  She is a goddess, Delilah remembers, tensing. Only she looks like a human woman—or like a poem about womanhood, not the real thing. Like an image painted by someone who has never lived it—who romanticizes it, who sees it from a distance. If Dragon imagined a woman, Delilah thinks, he would imagine this. These languid, comforting breasts. These cradling eyes. The taut, expressive throat; the dramatic, arched brows. Her cheeks curved inward around her mouth, making her bones look stark and her lips lonely. Or would he? This woman looks old, too. Not old like an old woman, but old like a grown-up. As if all of this time, they’ve only been children playing at life, forgetting they had a real mother after all, far older and wiser than they—

  I’m delirious. Delilah breaks away from the loose, peaceful arms and sits up, growling as she does so because it’s so hard. Her arm lies in her lap, wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth.

  “But it was a dream—” she starts, remembering the mountain lion. “It was a dream!” But what is a dream, anyway? She’s been living half in and half out of dreams for so long. The longer you’re alone, the harder it is to tell the difference.

  “Here,” says the goddess, and hands her cooked fish, folded inside a nest of crisp, burnt leaves. Delilah, starving, eats it like a monster, never taking her eyes from the goddess’s face. She tries to connect the nourishment in her mouth with the soft hands that held it. She doesn’t remember, in her whole life, anyone ever doing such a thing for her, for no reason. Her mother fed her, but she had to, didn’t she? And Moon is her friend, and Dragon wants her. But who else has ever handed her sustenance—who has ever held her in their arms out of sheer kindness? No one she can remember. Certainly never a woman.

  “Why are you helping me?” she asks, but the words come out flat. It’s not a question as much as a warning.

  The goddess looks at her, her smile thin and tired. Her eyes are lit caves. There is another life in the
re, Delilah thinks, startled. Somewhere else she could be.

  “You don’t want my help?”

  “No,” says Delilah. “I mean, thank you. You don’t have to. I’ll be fine.”

  “Can you stand?”

  Delilah tries. No. Maybe she lost a lot of blood.

  “I don’t understand,” says the goddess thoughtfully. “I don’t understand why people won’t be loved.”

  “What?” says Delilah, beginning to panic a little.

  “They cry out for love. They scream and they cry, but when I try to give them what they need, they push it away. They keep crying. Why is this? Can you explain this to me?”

  “I’m not crying,” Delilah manages, her voice constricted. If she could only stand, she’d be gone. Where is she? How far from her cave? She looks around, sees the steam rising in the distance. Dragon’s lair—a day’s walk away from her home. She’d never make it. She looks back at the goddess reluctantly. The goddess is looking at her.

  “Yes you are,” she says.

  Then she turns toward the river, looks into it with her liquid dress pouring down its banks, and speaks to it as if continuing a conversation she’s been having for a long time.

  “I can love them,” she murmurs. “I have love to give. But they don’t want love. They want something else. Something I don’t have.”

  Fuck, thinks Delilah. Whatever this is, she doesn’t want to get involved. Having finished the fish, she sits up dizzily. With difficulty, she maneuvers herself between stones to lay the lower half of her body in the riverbed, where she is barely shaded by two small trees. In some places the river is completely dry now, but here there is a little stream that’s enough to cool her feet. She rests her bandaged arm, burning hot in the cloth, on the stone beside her, and accepts the discomfort of bumpy earth against her spine. At least she can relax, now that she isn’t lying awkwardly in someone’s arms.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “Yora.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “Yes. It sounds familiar to me, too.”

  Delilah tries to look over at her, but the movement hurts her neck.

  Neither of them seems to know what to say next, so they don’t say anything. They remain there in silence, because neither of them is able to leave.

  Delilah rolls in and out of sleep. There are no dreams. Maybe it’s only the wind, but she thinks she can hear the sound of the river, as if its ghost flows audibly even when it’s gone. The song vibrates through her, reminding her of the loneliness in her hips, and quieting it at the same time. Her feet soften. Her belly relaxes.

  She opens her eyes. The sun is sinking, blinding, behind Yora’s head. The goddess, sitting next to Delilah upstream, is still gazing into that motion, as if she sees something Delilah cannot. There is nothing difficult in her presence. Delilah almost forgot she was there. Yet still, she would rather be alone. This kind of silence frightens her. She doesn’t understand what is expected.

  With men, it is easy. She can offer her body. She knows what she wants from them. And she can get it. But she has never had anything to offer a woman. Not Mira. Not her mother. Not the girls at school.

  Drawing up her knees, she tries to push herself backward, out of the riverbed. She doesn’t want to be in this position now, with Yora behind her where she can’t turn her neck to see. But it’s so difficult to move herself. This is what’s been happening to her for the last year: her body has become more and more difficult to move. That is what the pain is doing. It is trapping her. Realizing this makes her struggle harder.

  “It’s okay,” says Yora, and Delilah feels hands on her shoulders.

  “Stop!” she yells, so suddenly that her own voice knocks her forward. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Why not?” cries Yora, and Delilah can see her face, looking down from above, upside-down.

  “I don’t know,” she answers, and she is crying now, after all.

  “It’s okay,” murmurs Yora again, floating her with those soft hands deeper into the riverbed against her will, where suddenly the water seems deeper than she knew, so that her whole lower body lies still in the rushing water, and the water rushes in the direction of her body, from her hips down to her feet and away. Yora enters the water with her and cradles her head in her lap.

  “No—” says Delilah, still struggling. She would fight this woman with teeth and claws. With everything she has, if she had anything—if she weren’t so weak. She feels like she’s being killed.

  “It’s okay. Just let go. The river holds you. It doesn’t hurt.”

  “But it does,” sobs Delilah, who wonders if she is going mad. What hurts? Unraveling? Compassion?

  The river holds her and flows away from her at the same time. Her tears flow by and are gone. Her own blood carries her, floats her endlessly through herself. She lies in the arms of the river and the goddess, squeezing her eyes tight shut and then gradually relaxing, because she doesn’t have the strength not to. Time passes more and more easily. The sun shrinks, losing its intensity.

  Perhaps moments later—or perhaps much longer—there is a time when Delilah is aware that all the points of pain in her spine were only points where she could not let go. She begins to feel that her spine is not a solid chain of rocks but a river of liquid fire, carrying messages from one end of her body to another, and that the river is the spine of the Earth.

  There is a time when the anger disappears, at least for a moment. At least long enough for her to understand how terrified she is of what lies beneath it.

  “I don’t need your help,” she murmurs half-heartedly. “Really.”

  “I know,” says Yora. “You have everything you need. Far more than I have.”

  “What?” Delilah closes her good hand around an assortment of tiny pebbles beneath her, loose and bouncing in the water. Her left hand. The one that’s connected with her heart, and still works.

  “You have your body. I do not have a body—not a body that lives and dies and feels pain, like yours does.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “But I feel pain. I have felt the pain of so many, many people. And I have had nowhere to put it, no way to express it. You have your body to do that for you. Something real! Something that aches and cries. Your body takes all that passion and suffering and makes it into something beautiful—something that can make love and play and run toward what it desires.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Perhaps not. But I think you do.”

  Delilah is silent. She squeezes the pebbles, because it helps with the pain.

  “Your body is a map of the Earth,” Yora continues. “Through it, you could understand the whole world. But because you are part of that world, it is hard for you to see that.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “I am not a part of this world.”

  “Yes you are. You’re the goddess of this river.” She’s surprised to hear herself say it, and she doesn’t know where the knowledge comes from, but then she knows it must be true by the silence she feels behind her in response.

  Something awful flickers in that silence, and Delilah wonders if there is such a difference between gods and humans after all. Everyone is afraid of themselves. Everyone dies and is reborn, not once but many times, and no one can stop it.

  “You’re the goddess of this river,” she repeats, irritated by the silence, by the possibility that Yora will deny it.

  “Is that true?” asks Yora in a small voice. “Yes. Yes, maybe that is true.”

  “Did you forget?”

  “I do not know. Maybe I did.”

  “I can tell. I can tell you’re a water goddess, because my best friend is a water god.”

  “Yes,” says Yora, as if she knows. “You know all about water.”

  “But I don’t,” D
elilah whispers to herself. She pictures Moon hopping like raindrops over the desert floor in the night, all the creatures and plants awakening to his music because in his soul he is rain itself. She loves him from a deeper place in herself than she even knows, and deep down she understands him—or does she? In her heart she has been dry for so long. Her anger has been a fire that nothing could put out. Has she ever truly understood water? Has she ever understood what Moon is made of? She has surrendered to his embrace, but what has she learned from it? Only to tighten and constrict and dry up again, the moment he leaves her.

  The truth is she is afraid of water, afraid of that surrender. She is always encouraging Moon to be himself, to let it out, but maybe she never meant it. She, the one person who professed to honestly love him.

  Delilah can barely feel Yora’s presence now. Instead she feels something like sorrow darkening and slowing the water around her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I have been sitting by the river for many days,” Yora answers. “But not until today did I go inside it. With you.”

  “But why not? You are the river. Aren’t you? I mean, what is the purpose of a god anyway?” She’s starting to feel angry, hearing this vague voice, reminded of Moon and the way he runs away. “Why are you all so afraid to claim who you are?”

  Silence again. Delilah looks at the sky, a dusty rose. There are so many, many moons before the rains will come again. The water is beginning to chill her, as the desert opens its empty palm to the beginnings of night.

  “Sometimes,” says Yora, “you want to be anywhere but inside yourself. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” Delilah can feel Yora fading. Then all of the sudden she herself feels strong and clear. She sits up, pulls her body together, rolls onto her knees. She looks back at Yora’s face again—she’d forgotten what she looked like. She takes Yora’s arm with her good hand, and pulls her up. Yora yields as easily as water.