by Amy Weiss
Touch one and you touch them all.
She had been wrong about songs of loss. There are no such things. It is not possible to lose someone when he is you. And it is not possible to lose yourself when you are everywhere. When the glassy-eyed blue jay and the blue jay flying across the fields and the cat that holds both between its teeth are each other, when they are the very same soul at the very same time, then what does death mean? Furthermore, what does life mean? Life as she knows it is happening only to the most minor portion of her.
She had been wrong about love songs too. They are not what you sing when you have found another person, but when you have found one of the million missing pieces of yourself.
Still, there is pleasure in splitting apart, because it allows for the pleasure of merging together. To move from one into more is a grand adventure. When you are one, you cannot find yourself. There is no need; you are already there. You live in the one room of your house. To become many is to crawl through the thickets of life and the oceans of death in search of who you are. It is to discover in everyone you meet the unseen faces of your soul, the unknown spaces of your heart.
Reunion is the only joy sweeter than union. And so the woman and the husband hide themselves in different bodies and seek themselves across the landscapes of time. They find each other in the deserts and as the deserts. They love each other as moss, as silt, as brushfire. As the dandelion and the wind that sends it dancing. To be human is not the end. They will evolve beyond that, in whatever form that takes. Or perhaps they will be formless altogether. She will be a thought and he a feeling. She will be a note of music, he another, and their daughter yet a third, and they will twine themselves around each other to create a chord, the basis of harmony.
She turns to him now. He reaches for her. He reaches inside her. He moves inside her. There is nothing to separate him from her anymore; the fire has burned all his boundaries away. He can be in her and never leave, outside her and around her all at once. And she has been calling this loss?
They caress each other’s scars: where the flames singed his skin, where the oak tore her open. How do they touch without a body? They use all the bodies they have ever worn.
He is the mulberry moth, she the candle. He wraps his wings around her. Pulling away from her to become moth, coming closer to become light. Approaching her, withdrawing from her, engulfing her. Moth to light, moth away, moth to light, away. Fluttering, flickering. He clings to her light, she clings to his wings. She lights him on fire. Now moth is light.
She is the curtain, he the breeze that blows her back and forth. He is a sea of air, a wave of wind on which she sails. He pushes her away, he calls her near. Teasing her, lifting her to him, wafting through her. In and out, in and out. She floats, weightless, on the rhythm of his tide.
He is the hummingbird, bringing beak to honeysuckle. Drawing closer, drinking her in, consuming her. Flying away, flying back, drunk on her. His entire life the flower.
She is the river, he the stones of the bed over which she flows, every current a kiss.
He is the lightning cleaving the sky, she the thunder roaring in the wake of his fire. His sizzle and her shout.
The moon swimming in shadow, hungry for heat. The sun behind it, enveloping it, igniting it. Moon dissolving into sun, into a brilliance that blinds all who dare look.
The bow pressing itself against the violin, stroking her neck until she cries out with song.
The stained-glass dragonfly worshipping at the altar of the lotus, rapturous with prayer.
The trembling aspen, shaking from the slightest touch.
The glacier advancing, receding, touching ice, melting ice.
The weft, utterly powerless not to coil itself around the warp.
The husband and the woman, sighing and desiring each other into and out of existence.
The soul coming together, breaking apart. Reflecting itself, resurrecting itself. Electrifying the body, surpassing the body. Differentiating and combining. Cleaving and clinging. Dividing and multiplying. Separating and uniting.
Separating.
And uniting.
Over and over.
Without time.
Without end.
That is the everything.
LESSON 15
Coda
A body can contain only so many days and the woman’s not many more, so when her husband says, “Stay with me,” she is tempted to surrender the rest. The old are often granted this privilege, to glide out of a life and into a sleep so comfortable that return is neither necessary nor desired. And why would she choose to carve herself into pieces again, to submit to separation when union is all she has ever sought?
“Stay with me,” he says. “Isn’t that what you want?”
It is precisely what she wants. But she cannot leave her love song in the skies, unwritten, unheard. The final music lesson is not for her to receive but to impart. She must teach the soul what it was to be woman, what it was to be her. She must tell it everything she has come to know so that it can come to know itself. And there is only one language in which she is eloquent enough to describe such things.
Her decision surprises her even as she speaks it aloud. “I have to go back.”
And so one more time, one millionth time, they pull apart. She shivers as his spirit slips out of her and emptiness takes his place. However, this is nothing to mourn. Again and again, in a bed that glowed with moonlight, he had done the same with his body, yet she had never mistaken the parting as permanent.
She beckons for the mare to come. Are you ready for one last ride?
The mare knows that it is no longer needed, that it has given her all the music it possesses. The meter of its hooves clip-clopping through the seasons. The vibrato of its whinny, the staccato twitch of its tail, the ostinato of its fidelity. Its bones are nearly as old as hers, and it too can choose whether to relinquish them or rekindle them. It does not need to ask her permission, but it asks, because no one ever has.
“Go,” she tells it, and there is no grief, not this high up.
With her word, the mare erupts with light, or what some call death. Before her eyes it becomes a foal once more. It has stayed by her side throughout her entire journey. Now its own is about to begin.
“Good-bye, friend,” the woman murmurs, though the mare is already long gone, running wild through the night.
The woman’s body is lying where she left it. A few lotus breaths bring her back inside. It takes her a moment to regain her bearings, as can happen when one comes down from the clouds. Her eyes and hands search the surroundings. There is her harp. There is her book. There is her mare, cold and rigid. She looks around her, at the bare tree branches shaking with laughter in the wind, at the moon slinking across the sky, casting silver shadows on the ice. No. There is her mare.
She covers its body with snow, with a kiss.
She enters the cabin, sits at the desk, and places Music Lessons in front of her. This is her story; this is her score. She could rewrite it, rip out the pages, insist upon waltzes and not requiems, and neither her life nor her notation would ever know sadness. To play the music in a major or a minor key: this is the choice of the composer, not the composition.
She turns to the blank pages and begins to fill them with sound.
She draws the staff by hand, that loom through which she threads her notes and weaves her tune.
The treble clef is a curling plume of smoke.
Can music exist without time? Why not? Life does. In place of a time signature, she puts only a dot.
Is life an étude, an exercise, a place to hone one’s skills? An improvisation or an opus? She writes: TO BE PLAYED GRAVE, SERIOUS. But something that is meant to be played should not be so serious. She revises it: TO BE PLAYED FORTISSIMO, VERY STRONG—with all the power of a butterfly. This is not quite right, either. She crosses out both instructions and decides: AD LIBITUM, AT THE DISCRETION OF THE PERFORMER.
Four notes are all that are needed to
compose the human, the falcon, the masterpiece. This, too, shall be her scale.
The passages climb the heavens and plummet into pitch-black caves. The chords are inversions, because everything is an inversion. A child dying inside, instead of living outside. A man turning to dust. Loss turning to learning.
PLAY THESE PASSAGES AGAIN. AND AGAIN. AND AGAIN. She’d made her sorrow a leitmotif. This is not music; it is madness. She pauses for a moment and writes: THEN, PLAY THEM NO MORE.
Her life had been so full of the accidental, always deviating from the expected. Everything seemed a mistake. Now that she is lucid, nothing could be less so. She adds the accidentals to her piece. Grief flattens the spirit. Pain sharpens the heart. She changes them to naturals. The notes decay, just like bodies. She allows this, knowing that they will be born again in the next measure.
She sings the lyrics aloud. LITTLE BIRD, BLUE BIRD, WHY OH WHY SO BLUE? BECAUSE IT ATE A BLUE FRUIT. And forgot to taste its sweetness, the woman chides herself. Little bird, don’t you know that is what the fruit is for?
She transposes the little bird into a swan, mute until the moment of its death, when it finally bursts with all the beauty it could not speak in life. Whose song is not a lament but a hallelujah.
For the mare, she composes movement after movement.
She had asked the king and queen to resurrect her husband, yet she is the one who brings him back. He reappears in each piece she writes. He comes alive in each phrase. Fire did not steal his breath, for he breathes life into her and inspires every note. She had not realized that all along it was they who could turn themselves immortal, and that death is as powerless against art as it is against love.
She compresses her years into measures, arranges her memories into harmonies. The fermata of being lost in the forest. The faint ghost notes, sensed more than heard. The tempo rubato of the waters of time. An act of compassion, enclosed in repeat signs. HOLD THIS NOTE. HOLD IT FOREVER. The baritone beats of her old, whalelike heart; the snaky cadence of venom entering its chambers. The furious conducting of the antlike being, without whom the music would have ended too soon—or never begun. The glissando of sliding along the cord between the mother and the stars. The melody of the sparrow, who taught the warrior in her how to turn suffering into song. The ascending arpeggio of love, which keeps rising higher and higher and—oh! It’s just flown off the ledger lines. The eternal trill between angel and human, human and angel.
Last, the conclusion. The rest. THE END.
As if such a thing were even possible! DA CAPO AL CODA, she writes. PLAY FROM THE BEGINNING.
Once she was anonymous. Now she has learned who she is, and on the last page of the book she signs her names with a flourish:
ARIA.
THE OAK.
THE HIGHER SELF.
THE EVERYTHING.
She picks up the harp. The white light forms from her hands. It spreads along the staffs and sets the songs on fire. The strings, as she touches them, become silky and loose. One by one, they pull away from the soundboard, mulberry moths circling a willow that weeps no more. Still she plays on. She does not need the instrument. She is the instrument.
The light swells inside her, presses against her, too bright for her body to constrain any longer. Softly, lovingly, it cracks her shell open and releases her. Movement. Freedom. She takes to the skies. There is no difference anymore between sound and silence, music and moth and man. These are simply the scattered pieces of her making their way back to the one.
The warm sea of the night sky envelops them all.
It enfolds them in its arms.
It whispers, “Welcome home.”
LESSON 16
Reprise
“Here you are, my little bird.”
The woman opens her eyes.
She is lying beside the lake of time, warming herself on its banks, drying the decades from her wings.
“And here you are,” she says. It is not a question anymore. It is as clear as the water that stretches before her. Why had she insisted on turning reality into such a riddle?
Her husband smiles. “Where else could I be?”
From far off, she can hear the voice of the old man instructing some lost soul to go deeper.
The splash of a diver slicing through the depths of time.
The laughter of her daughter playing around in water and in bodies.
The thunder of hoofbeats galloping across the sky. The mare finally catching the sun.
Centuries float past the woman and her husband. Yesterdays drift in the breeze. Forever quietly laps against the shores where they sit and watch the generations come and go.
His words are a ripple across the lake, an echo in her ear: “What would you like to do now?”
It is what he asks in her dreams. Is she dreaming?
No. She is awake.
She says, “I’d like to grow.”
“How shall we love each other next?” he asks. “As mangroves, canyons, companions? Let us be twin brothers or twin flames. Or you could be an oyster, and I the pearl you cradle and make glow.”
“As all of those,” she tells him, for they are but different names to call oneself, different mirrors of the same face. “As everything.”
“I will be a doctor and bring you to life with my touch.”
“I will do the same,” she says.
“We could live among war.”
“We’d learn much that way.”
“Or among roses and buttercups.”
“That way, too.”
Somewhere in the world, two spirits are twining themselves around each other, calling to her, composing the chords of her body and the pulse of her heart. The sound draws her to the water’s edge.
What was it like to be human? It is like trying to recall the details of a dream she’d had as a child. In the distance four notes begin to play, faintly at first, and then rolling like a mist along the lake. Something ancient and familiar reverberates within her, a melody forgotten by the mind yet remembered by the bones.
Her husband stands next to her, enticed by the strains of his own theme.
Time calls her closer, invites her inside.
Once she had asked herself why she would have entered it at all.
This is her answer. It was for the music, for the beautiful music.
For the chance to become, for one brief and thrilling moment, a song.
Their daughter waves to them from the center of the lake. Come on in. The water’s fine.
Her husband reaches for her. “Shall we dive together?”
He is my teacher and he is my neighbor and he is my sister and he is my husband and he is my wife and he is my child and he is my self.
“We always do,” she replies.
They take another step forward.
He turns to her for one last look at her light. “Come find me,” he says, “and sing me a love song.”
As if there could be any other kind. The woman laughs.
Then she leaps and lets go.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone at Hay House for welcoming me so warmly into your family. I deeply appreciate everyone who worked on this book. Thank you to Sally Mason-Swaab, Stacy Horowitz, and Mollie Langer. Patty Gift, you are a wonderful editor, friend, and teacher. You show me what it is to be gentle, patient, and gracious; you shaped this book, and me along with it. Reid Tracy, thank you for your vision and your trust and for taking a chance on this book. My world has turned on your kindness.
Massimiliano Ungaro, if only all writers could have a first reader as special as you, one who reads with his heart. Thank you for helping me grow. Thank you to Rachel Sullivan for your thoughtful edits, to Kimberly Clark Sharp for your wisdom, and to Dave Bricker for your artistry.
My family and friends were a great source of support during the writing process, in particular Jordan Weiss, Darrah Gilderman, Jennifer Williams, Jill Cohen, Lydia Grunstra, and Vanessa Benitez.
Schnitzel, you were by
my side for every single word, tirelessly teaching me of loyalty and love.
Finally, thank you to my incredible mother and father, without whom this book would not exist. Your generosity, encouragement, and support are as limitless as the universe. I am forever grateful to you. You have given me 40,000 years of love—and so much more.
Reader’s Guide
The book opens with the concept of souls planning their lives before birth, as the husband and the woman select certain experiences and people to be part of their lives. Do you believe that such planning takes place prior to incarnation?
Think about the important people in your life. Could your souls have met and made certain agreements before your lives began? What might these people be here to teach you? Why might you have wanted them to be a part of your life? Does your answer change depending on whether a person has had a positive or negative impact on you? If you chose to interact with these people in order to learn and to grow, is there such a thing as a “negative” impact?
Although the woman plans her life before it begins, she states these plans can be altered. What are your thoughts about free will? How does it interact with destiny? Do they both exist? Can they both exist at the same time? Is one more dominant than the other, and if so, which one?
A powerful connection exists between humans and animals, both wild and domesticated. The mare is intuitively aware of the woman’s feelings and thoughts. Do you feel that the animals and/or pets in your life share this same ability? What have they taught you? What have they shown you about yourself that you otherwise might not have known? In what ways might an animal’s consciousness be more limited than that of humans, and in what ways might it be more expansive?