Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “And as if she could hear my thoughts, Yora said, ‘What is the gift of Sorrow?’

  “Lonely said, ‘It is Sorrow that brings me home. So I don’t get lost. So I don’t float away forever. It gets so lonely up there in the sky. The first time I felt sorrow was when my father died. I am grateful for that, because it brought me down out of that tower, down to the earth, and through the sea, and to the place where I first felt the fire and knew I was real.’

  “Yora said, ‘Sorrow brings you home. Let the water flow you back together. It will feel, Princess, as if we have given you nothing. It will feel as if you have nothing, for a time. But that is a good darkness you are in. In that darkness, if you stay awake, you will begin again and become who you truly are.

  “‘For all of the gifts we give you are Love. Sorrow is Love. Anger is Love. Fear is Love. When you realize this, you will use those emotions as powers, to do whatever you want with—make whatever magic you wish. Each of you will become sorcerers of emotion. But remember’—and she looked at all of us — ‘that you love each other. Remember that the Wind blows the Water, and the Water shapes the Earth, and the Earth smothers the Fire, but the Fire changes the Earth, and the Air feeds the Fire, and the Fire heats the Water, and the Water puts out the Fire, and the Air blows the dry Earth, and the Earth pulls the Water down into its deepest valleys, the Seas.’”

  Fawn pauses and takes a deep breath. “Then we could feel Lonely leaving us. We could feel her in the river passing on. We could feel the way she swirled around each of our bodies, thanked us, and said goodbye. When she came around me, in the form of the river, she was warm. My body went weak. I felt my body alive, desperate to be touched, the way I haven’t felt in so long. That was always her gift to me—one of her many gifts to me.

  “She didn’t feel like Sorrow now. She felt like laughter—the laughter of falling apart, of letting go. I even thought I heard her whisper to me, It is for the laughter we once shared that I will return one day. It is for this laughter that I am human. Then she was gone.

  “But the three of us remained. I was shaking. I felt like I had just been born. I wasn’t even thinking about Kite. The pleasure of my own life—the soil under my palms, the sugar of food, the flow of the hills, the first flowers of spring—was almost too much for me to bear. I wanted to be with you again, with this completely selfish desire that I didn’t know I had in me. But Yora was beckoning me, and I came toward her, and in coming toward her I came closer to Delilah, who was still curled over on the stone, unseeing. The two of us came around her, making a tight circle with our arms. I wasn’t afraid any more. This pleasure within me was so abundant, so overflowingly warm, it was as if I had too much to give to draw back from anything in fear. I had to give it. I had to. I don’t know who began it or how I knew, but somehow we both began to caress Delilah. Her fast, quiet sobs immediately stilled, and she tensed her whole body for a long time under our touch. I touched her the way I wanted to be touched. I touched her the way I once touched Lonely, as if I had never seen such beauty. Soon she began to relax, but at the same time she twisted under our hands as if in pain. I don’t think she knew where she was or what she was doing, but she began to clutch at herself, and she began to cry out—breathless, shocked little screams—and then between our hands she became a whirlwind of fire that rose into the air and was gone.

  “Yora and I stood then alone, and the empty air between us felt very serious and very still. She said, ‘Poor Lil, she is so lonely, and doesn’t even know. She will wake from this dream forever changed, but she will forget the dream itself. Tonight she saw the darkest part of herself emerge, and surrendered in a way she never meant to surrender. In her waking life, it will be too much for her to remember, and so she will not.’

  “I said, ‘Will I remember?’

  “And Yora said, ‘You alone, Fawn, will remember every moment and every word. It is you, keeper of Earth, who will keep the Story, and you will always remember it, and you will pass it on, and you will learn to understand it in your waking mind and heart. You have no choice in this.’

  “‘What about you?’ I said.

  “She said, ‘I am the Story. I just go on.’

  “And then she was the river again, simply flowing on, and then there I was, at the river’s edge. I was no longer inside it but now watching it flow by, while I stayed there, the same, in the same place. I was back at the edge where I had first knelt with Lonely, and I was still in my dry clothes, as if I had never gone in.”

  She stops now. Never, perhaps, in her whole life, has she spoken so many words at once, and so easily, and with such certainty. She knows it is Rye who allowed her to speak them. It is only him she feels this safe with, this unconditionally held.

  Yet she doesn’t know if he truly wanted to hear or if he understood. She wonders if he is worrying about Lonely, wondering where she has gone. She tries to see his reaction inside his eyes, and cannot. “You are the one I wanted to tell first,” she repeats urgently. “You are the first person to hear this story.” Then she adds, in a whisper, “You, always, have helped me to remember myself. You were the first person who ever saw me, before I even saw myself.”

  Rye smiles. “Now I am seeing you all over again,” he says.

  Fawn nods, letting the tears fall, for she is seeing herself again, too, and now she is looking back at Rye. Who is he? Suddenly it seems clear to her what the distance between them was made of. It was made of the whole landscape of his emotions. What Kite’s loss feels like to him. What he wakes to every day, the only man in a house he once shared with his son. What he hides inside that calm silence she so envied. What he felt walking back through the forest after saying goodbye to Kite, knowing Kite was grown now, knowing he could not carry him home. All these feelings she does not know and has never even asked.

  Like an injured animal, clumsy and soft, she inches toward him, her knees and buttocks scraping the hearth made of stone that he once laid by hand to prove his love for her. She wraps her arms and legs around him, and he bows his head into her warmth.

  “How are you?” she whispers, and feels his shaking response.

  And she hopes that someday Lonely, if she doesn’t already, will understand—in the chords of her own body—how inside Fear is courage, and inside Sorrow is the joy that comes from simple release, the muscles finally relaxing.

  How Anger is only the longing to connect more deeply, to hold fast with claws of fire, and how, through that ugly, painful, mortal merging—in which we are split open, in which so much that we knew of ourselves is lost—comes the only true empathy that allows us to finally forgive.

  “Miri,” says Delilah, before she even wakes.

  She comes to consciousness slowly through aching memories of love: Dragon’s listening body, Dragon cradling her, Dragon asking her to tell her story when she had so many emotions she didn’t know how to feel that the only way she could let them out was by coming in his arms. A light, cold rain is falling, and she can feel Moon inside it, silently desperate, like the pleading inside someone’s eyes when they have no words to tell you what they need.

  “Miri.” That’s what she used to call her sister, and Lilah is what her sister said back. Those were their names when they knew each other, when they were truly kin.

  Delilah is lying in the river, and it’s still the middle of the night. She feels her fear of the men, who know now that she is out here. For an instant, she feels the sorrow of her loneliness. She crawls out of the water, takes off her wet clothes, puts on her mother’s sweatshirt and then a tattered man’s jacket. Her body is so tired.

  “Miri,” she whispers. The barest fragments of a dream make her tremble, and she feels a calling she hasn’t felt for some time now, from deep within her body, like the way she used to feel when a man touched her. It’s like that now: that first, most tender yearning, her body softening into colors, deliciously sexy, and yet it is not a man that
she wants. She misses again the cave she lived in for so long, and feels the strength of earth that she breathed in from that cave for years and years. She feels the quickness of air, and the longing in its uneven stretch around her. She feels the elements that make her the warrior she is—not only fire. But she can’t remember the dream.

  All she is left with in this moment is her sister’s name. When she closes her eyes, she sees her sister screaming, back when screaming was the only sound she had left. From the moment they took Mira away, Delilah had taken over that rage. She had said, in her heart, I will take this now, for you. I will carry it. I will continue the fight for you. But for what? She doesn’t even know what Mira was angry at, or why she was screaming.

  Maybe that rage wasn’t what Mira needed her to carry after all. Maybe what Mira needed her to carry was this tiny light that’s been glowing in her belly now, that has seemed to sustain her for longer than she thought possible. Maybe it was a kind of unspeakable tenderness that the world had no room for, like the look the deer held in her eyes, that Delilah never admitted to because she never thought she was the kind of person who could be the guardian of such a thing. But maybe that’s what Mira’s rage, all that time, was trying to protect, somehow.

  “Miri,” she says out loud now. “What do you want me to do?”

  The wind blows a little, fresh with the night right around her but bringing scents of things far away. Salt water. Fields. Smoke.

  You have to follow the other river.

  Delilah looks up. The stars squint at her doubtfully. She felt like she heard something, from somewhere, though no one is there.

  Lilah.

  “What?” Delilah cries in a rush, standing up as if that will help, as if straightening her aching spine will help the voice to flow into her more easily. She steadies herself, closes her eyes again. “Miri.” She tries to breathe slowly, tries to stay calm. It wasn’t the voice she remembers. But then again, Miri is an adult now, if she’s still alive. Delilah always forgets that. She would sound different, if she spoke.

  Follow the other river. The voice—is it inside Delilah’s head?—isn’t kind or suffering or crazy or loving. It’s barely even alive. But it has to be Mira’s.

  “Not the road,” says Delilah, and she knows she means it, suddenly. She will not ask the men for help. Not for anything. Not even for her sister.

  Not the road. The real river. Under the desert, it forks. One way, straight from here to the sea, you’ll die. The other way, through the City, it will come up again.

  Delilah’s heart beats so hard it hurts her chest—clumsy and fast, as if it’s forgotten its own rhythm. She did not truly realize, until this moment, how much the idea of returning to the City repulses her. She would rather turn around. Is it fear? Hatred? What is it?

  “No,” she says without thinking. She squeezes her eyes tight shut, tenses her throat. Why couldn’t her sister ever talk to her before? Delilah knew that wisdom was in there. She felt it in Mira’s gaze. She knew Mira knew so much more—that could help her, that could make everything make sense—if only she would speak.

  You’re braver than me, is what Mira’s voice seems to say now.

  Delilah waits, hungrier than she’s ever been. She wants the voice to say Please. Please rescue me. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t speak again. Why should she go on? Does her sister even want to be rescued? Will she even know who Delilah is?

  But she spoke, and who knew what effort it cost her, to reach across worlds into Delilah’s mind. She is alive. There is so much Delilah isn’t sure of, any more, but in the strange clarity that came to her when she woke from this dream that she doesn’t remember, she feels sure that she didn’t make this up.

  She stares across the expanse of nothing between herself and the lit haze of the City. She’d tried to avoid ever looking in that direction until now. The sight of it makes her nauseous again, as if the world is turning upside down. She hates its power—the way its lights beckon to her across the desert from over a day’s walk away, as if knowing they will win in the end.

  She lies back down and, tucking her backpack under her head, tries to sleep again. She doesn’t want to figure anything out, not now. But her mind keeps spinning, long into the morning hours, until the air is so warm she has to take off all her layers except her T-shirt and jeans, and then she finally loses consciousness under the weight of its heat. A tiny lizard crawls into her open hand and sits there in the light, and in her sleep she feels the love coming down through its body from the sun.

  It isn’t until the next evening, when she forces herself to walk in thoughtless, delirious faith across the empty sand with the river’s comforting roar receding behind her, and the lights of the place she hates the only hope to guide her, that she hears Miri’s voice one more time. And this time she isn’t at all sure that it is real.

  What if I can’t love you, Lilah? it says.

  Delilah keeps walking, looking down so she doesn’t have to look up.

  Will you still rescue me, even if I can’t give you anything, even if I can’t love you back?

  Maybe it isn’t Miri’s voice, but only Delilah’s own mind, that speaks this fear—for she knows that to do this, she is going to have to let go of even that last, final hope: that hope she’s been cradling so gingerly against her heart, without admitting it to herself, that somehow Miri will be different now. That she will look back at Delilah from behind her own eyes, that she will answer in human words, that they will hear each other’s stories and finally make sense to each other and to themselves, that Miri will recognize her and call her Lilah in her real human voice, and that Miri will laugh and smile and be her friend, her sister, her companion.

  Yet whether or not the words are real, Delilah still feels the empathy they bring. Because she knows what that feels like, to wish hopelessly but defiantly against all odds that someone will take you just as you are, for no reason.

  Sky clutches the Unicorn’s mane in one fist. He isn’t aware that he is only thirteen years old now. He isn’t aware that the Unicorn can feel his sorrow, though she cannot see him, as moments before he could feel her scream, though he could not hear it.

  The marsh is as he remembers it, only without people.

  The water is a perfect mystery of patterned green, as unreadable as a snowflake, just as he remembers it. The trees’ roots enter the water like mossy hooves and cast long, lichen-bearded shadows over the water as clear as solid forms. A council of dragonflies wings a web of air among the giant, saucer-shaped leaves that float their ruffled edges like flying lily pads. Birds that seemed to be branches suddenly and slowly stretch their long, long necks out over the glimmer of a fish. Herons pant and fan their wings in solemn puffs, in a day-long ritual of heat and stillness. Giant spiders meditate in their giant webs. A kind breeze turns up the faces of the flowers—all as he remembers it. But there are no voices. There are no houses.

  The Unicorn walks, and he knows she walks because she is afraid. For all of their magic, Unicorns cannot climb trees. She is almost up to her shoulders in the green water, almost swimming, and the water creeps up to his thighs now, and then to his groin. Every muscle in his body tells him to flee, to leap up into the trees, to climb and swing up to safety. But he doesn’t want to leave the Unicorn.

  “Unicorn,” he whispers. “I think it’s better if you keep still.”

  But she doesn’t seem to hear. She carries him away from where the people used to sing and fish, and into the thicker vines, and deeper, where almost no light penetrates. She plunges faster, stumbling, with no direction. Sky hears a familiar bird, a bird that warns of crossing a boundary. Its call is musical but off-key, ending on a note unbalanced, like an interrupted cry.

  He tells himself he isn’t afraid—here in his homeland.

  But maybe he is.

  Where are all the people?

  The idea of fear begins to nag at him
. What if he was always afraid? What if it was his very fear that made him fight so hard, as if to deny to himself that he wanted the very thing he fought—that he wanted the maiden to get rescued; he wanted someone to stop that terrible process that he could not, because he was part of it, though he never understood it?

  Now as he looks around him, he seems to see things differently. A tree drapes its vines close to his hair and sways there softly. A mouse pauses on a branch and looks directly at him. The wind blows, and for a moment all the lilies seem to turn in unison. It isn’t like when he lived at the top of the world, and all the animals were spirits, and he spoke their language as if it were his own. These beings seem mysterious to him, and far away. And yet he suddenly sees them differently.

  Don’t you recognize us? the wind asks him.

  A strange idea of reality comes tumbling through his mind like a stray autumn leaf with something written on it—nothing but an idea, and yet it comes through him whole, as if he’d thought about it for a long time. It seems almost as if his people were never destroyed after all. As if none of what happened really happened. As if Hanum’s coming, and the stealing of the maiden, and the breaking of the ritual, and the destruction of their world, had all happened to Sky alone—as if in some foolish dream from which he never remembered to wake—while his people went on living without him in the real world which could never be destroyed. Over hundreds of years they lived on without him, continuing to evolve into the light, their lives stretching longer and longer, slower and ever more sweetly, until they evolved beyond themselves and no longer needed their human forms, and surrendered themselves fully, finally to…to what?

  The Unicorn is trying to keep moving, but she’s sunk up to her neck. Sky is up to his waist, and the water is colder than he ever knew—because he never knew how cold it was, because he never touched it, not once—and it smells of salt and death. Now the Unicorn’s horn is tangled in the vines, and she is thrashing about in a panic beneath him, and he wants to tell her again to be still, but by the time she stops he knows it is too late. All they can hear is the sound of her wild, rasping breath as she pants into the stillness, the swell and fall of her belly between his calves gradually quieting.