Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The moon rolls slowly around her dreams, and when she wakes she is staring right at it. It is not yet a complete circle but still an undefined whiteness. She watches it tuck into the horizon, into the other side of the world, and though she cannot yet picture the shape of the world, she feels it now in her body. She feels how the moon, like the sun, will come back. She feels the shape of returning. She feels how the moon, like she herself, loves the earth, is held fast to it, and will never leave it. And now she is touching herself, caressing parts of her body that have no name, and it feels to her that she is also touching the moon, and that the magic of her touch turns the hills to song. She closes her eyes at the crescendo and imagines her lover cascading over her like water.

  She begins to wake every morning full of her own body, its weight poignant within her, heavy and echoing with song. When the horse goes to the river to drink, Lonely always finds herself thirsty and drinks too. She is humbled by this need, which makes her get down off the easy height of the horse and lower her body against the ground, and try clumsily to gather the water with her hands.

  Each day, she listens to the wind, because she has no one else to listen to. She does not trust it, and she will not answer it back, but its voice is becoming familiar. And she envies the way it sings to the grasses, and the way the grasses murmur back.

  Grow, First Life, the wind sings to them, in a voice of tenderness it never uses with Lonely. Good, simple grasses, strong and faithful, make home for the kingdom of insects, make Place out of Nothingness….

  The grasses hold the earth together with the million tiny limbs of their roots—hold it in its springtime expansion, as with the coming warmth the whole planet takes a deep breath in. Their roots interlock like nerves beneath the skin of the earth. The wind plays them like an instrument, and they sing songs of those things the earth can feel: the footsteps of people and animals, and the scrape of human tools somewhere, where men dig deeper into the heart of the earth as if digging for their own hearts. The grasses grow up from the decay of wild things who died in peace, knowing they died in the service of other lives; and they grow up from the decay of human beings who died without knowing why, who lived without knowing why, who never did what they meant to do or spoke what they wanted to say.

  The grasses bend easily for the passing of Lonely and the horse, and easily bend back again. They speak of their passing along the path of longing, a path that all living things know and travel. It is a path the grasses make easy, for it is the purpose of living things to seek after what they desire. The grasses rise up for the light, and they feel that Lonely rises in that direction too.

  The wind sings to the grasses, and to the horse who does not yet recognize itself. And the crickets sing on, their song flowing beyond the girl and the horse (for the girl and the horse are too big for them to comprehend, too big to matter), with their song which is bigger than anything, which pulses in earth and air and in the sensation of all things, a song of desire which will and must be satisfied.

  Soon Lonely begins riding at night as well as during the day, pressing the horse onward, anxious to be somewhere. She watches the moon grow, wondering what it is, wondering what it means. She is brand new to the world, and feels that perhaps it belongs to her alone. She hopes it is a sign of something coming. After all, she did not see it when she woke to herself in the tower. Only now that she is free has it begun to swell.

  As they come closer to the serrated edge of the ridge that first separated them from the City, the hill on the other side of them soars into a high cliff, its side naked and dribbling dust, and hems them in close. They enter the passage between the two heights, and the river, which has become a tiny, rock-hidden creek, dives under the earth and disappears. The horse tarries, moodily eating what little grass he can still find, and twitches his ears at the wind.

  “Come on,” Lonely says, glancing around, unsure. She knows the horse is afraid to lose sight of water, but she wants to know what will happen on the other side of the passage. She slides off the horse’s back and walks, looking back and beckoning him onward. But he rears his head and snorts, his eyes frozen.

  “Fine,” says Lonely, “stay there.” For today her body is excited, her heart weary and panting from the hopeless infinity of the fields. Cool sand imprints itself against the curves of her feet as she rounds the bend and emerges into the light to overlook—the desert.

  Is this where the wind comes from? It leaps off the ledge where she stands. It flies beyond her. Lonely can hear it roaring all the way into infinity. And looking into that vast canyon of strange shapes, murky with heat, the plants hard as coral and rampant with color, Lonely feels she is about to descend again to the bottom of the sea.

  She drops to the ground, steadies herself on hands and knees. As the City tried to pull her in, so does the desert, but differently. It seems the wind is pulling her this time, calling her out into space. Her desire to let go of her body and fly, like the infinity she felt when she glimpsed the mountain from her tower for the first time, is so strong it terrifies her. She must hold to the ground. Her humanness seems to battle with the wind.

  But she must go down. In all those mysteries of shadow, among such shapely and colorful living things, surely someone else must be out there? Though she imagines her prince on top of that far mountain, its white peaks only more unreachable the more she travels toward it, right now she hopes she will find someone nearer. She cannot wait for such a long distance. She is so lonely. The memory of Yora’s body fills her with sweet exhaustion. She wants to feel finally, for sure, that her body is real to someone other than herself. Perhaps when she descends into this dry sea, a hand will grasp hers as Yora’s did in the depths of the water, and pull her up into the salvation of flesh.

  Forgetting the horse, she slides through the wind on her bottom in an avalanche of sand, down into the canyon of red and gold fire.

  Deep in the green mountains to the east, a girl named Chelya wakes on the earth with a smile. Today is her birthday.

  She is up fast; she grabs her blanket and stuffs it under one arm. The trees wave at her from the edge of the field. She hums as she walks, sending her song to the little beings in the grass. The earth sings back to her. She knows how it will be today—everything she touches awakening like magic. It is like this every year. She is so lucky to have been born in the springtime.

  This year seems even more alive, even more wakeful than any that came before. Maybe it’s because something is changing in the world. She knows her mother is afraid, and her grandmother dreams of anger in the City, but in her bones Chelya feels the coming of joy. She believes in it. People want to be happy. They want to love and remember their world.

  Or maybe what she senses is something in herself, some intuition that a new fairy tale, like nothing she’s ever known before, is about to enter her own life. Today she is sixteen.

  Surrounded by mountains grander and older than all of human history, she pauses amid tiny details to pick flowers on the way to her house, talking to them as she pinches their stems in her fingertips. For my birthday, she tells them. She would never hurt them, normally. But she wants to bring her mother something pretty, something to say thank you for giving her life. She thinks about this, pausing for a moment—how in order to give a gift to someone, she has to first ask something to give a gift to her. It’s true, she thinks. We don’t own anything. What is giving, but some mysterious will that causes life to move from one being through another?

  When she looks up, a man is coming from the forest, his hands out to touch the flowers with his fingertips as he passes. He is heading toward the house, but when he sees her, he turns toward her instead. She is so startled to see someone—it couldn’t be her uncle, he just came, so would it be another farmer they don’t know?—that she doesn’t notice at first the way he is moving, as if his feet touch the earth only by chance. Then she realizes he is a god. Then the sun falls over his face, and
he gives her his shy grin, and she sees that it is Moon.

  She starts to drop the flowers, and then she grabs them up again, fumbling with them against the tangle of her nightgown. She is already shouting his name as she runs toward him. She flings her arms around his thin body, for she has already grown bigger than him. He’s laughing his silent laugh, and his hair is shaggy around his innocent face, like her brother’s, but unlike her brother he smells like cold dew or fresh puddles after a rain.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever!” she cries.

  “I’m glad I found you here. I wanted to bring you all some salt, but I wasn’t sure if I should go to the door. I might frighten your mother.” He’s serious as he says this, looking into her eyes.

  “Oh,” says Chelya quickly. “She loves you, really. We all love you, Moon. And she and all of us, we’re so grateful for your gifts. She gets nervous around gods, that’s all. My mother is very— But you know how she is.”

  “Earth people,” says Moon, and smiles. “Your family is completely terrified of me. I know. They look at the City, and they see what a mess of things a god can make.”

  “No.” Chelya shakes her head, embarrassed. “Only my mother. My father’s much more open. And Kite, he isn’t scared of you. He just doesn’t—he doesn’t believe you’re a god, exactly. I mean he doesn’t believe in gods at all.”

  “Yeah,” sighs Moon. “I don’t believe in gods either.”

  Chelya looks down and touches her flowers. “But Moon!” she says. “Thank you for the salt. I’m so happy. We have been dying for it, I’m telling you. We ran out a long time ago. The goats will be happy, too.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner.” He wrinkles his soft, girlish brow. “I didn’t even go to the sea for so long.”

  “Oh, no! I didn’t mean to make you feel—” Chelya begins.

  But he waves her protests away and takes her by the shoulders, pressing her lightly between his sweet hands. “You look lovely, Chelya. I can’t imagine you dying for anything. I mean, you always seem so happy with just what you have.” He looks wistful.

  “But I have so much. And I’m not always happy…” She thinks of her brother, how he sulks sometimes and won’t talk to her, and of how her mother worries. These things make her unhappy. “But I’m so lucky, Moon.” She looks at him, concerned.

  “It’s true, you’re very lucky. You don’t know what’s out there in the world, how lonely people are, what kinds of things they do…” He trails off. “You’re isolated here.”

  Chelya laughs. “Are you kidding? Isolated from what? This is the world, all around me. It doesn’t end. There’s no fence enclosing me. Everything I connect with connects with everything else. It’s the people in the City that are isolated, from what you say.”

  Moon nods, but he’s looking at the ground and doesn’t seem to hear her. It suddenly seems to Chelya that he has grown too much older since she last saw him, that his clear kindness and love are confused by something, that he is forgetting who he is.

  “Stay a while,” she says. “Sleep out in the fields like me and Kite, and we’ll talk about things. You never stay. I want to hear about the world! I want to hear about the sea and the desert, and my brother wants to hear, too. It would be good for him. Please.”

  But she has never known him to stay, never. Why won’t he let anyone close to him? Why won’t he let anyone know him? She’s not surprised when he shakes his head, still not looking at her. “I’ve been avoiding someone. I have to go.”

  “Who? Why?” she asks, fascinated.

  “Because I love her too much.” He laughs and looks at Chelya, his eyes too bright. “You don’t understand that, do you?”

  Chelya shakes her head. “Not really.”

  “You’re so good, Chelya. You have a good, clear heart. You love people and you act on that love, and it’s that simple.”

  “Oh, I’m not that good,” Chelya protests again, feeling awkward. “I mean, I tease my brother sometimes. And I go out on the full moon even though it makes my mother worry, and I don’t tell her where I’m going. And sometimes I forget my chores because I’m distracted by… things.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Moon, and she can hear the leaving in his voice. “I keep making you defend yourself. I didn’t mean to.” From seemingly nowhere, he produces a sack of sea salt, and she slings her blanket over her shoulder and takes it in her arms, still gripping the flowers in one fist. “Have you got it?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” says Chelya. The weight of it feels good, settling her into the warm reality of the day. She feels her feet sink slightly into the earth. She imagines a body of water so big that all this salt weighs nothing inside it. No one could ever cry enough tears, or run enough distance to sweat this much salt.

  “Bye, Chelya,” he says, grinning, and she feels happy again, loving him. “And happy birthday.”

  “Bye, Moon,” she says. She stands still with the sack of salt until he begins floating away. Then she turns back toward the house. She feels like she’s carrying a weight of tears. There is a secret message in that weight that she wishes she could decipher. She wishes she could take the real burden from his small, ethereal form, whatever it is, and toss it to the winds.

  As she walks back, the sky covers her with grey musing, and she can smell rain coming. What a gift on her birthday, to have the sky make love to the earth for the first time since the melting of the snow.

  That night the white horse hangs his head by the end of the river, unwilling to go after Lonely, and knowing he cannot go back.

  Why don’t you go with her? the wind asks him.

  I’m just a horse, says the horse. She doesn’t belong to me.

  Go back then, says the wind, without feeling.

  The horse is silent.

  You are not just a horse, the wind adds. And you know it. You are somebody’s soul.

  The heat battles Lonely’s flesh. She takes off her dress and carries it like a loose rag in her hand, its tattered edges dragging in the dust, and she follows the broken line of a winding ridge down to the bottom of the canyon.

  It takes all day.

  Sometimes the earth is hard, and sometimes helpless and soft as her own strangely smooth skin which mesmerizes her now in its nakedness. The sun swings recklessly across the sky, hurtling its rays at her, pressing her down so that she must stop to rest on random outcroppings and sleep beneath its weight. Being part goddess, she does not die, but each time she wakes, her mind is hazier. By the time she reaches the bottom of the canyon, she has forgotten the mountain. She has no direction.

  Then the sun melts over the far cliff she came from, and a shadow swings over her, bringing instantaneous cold. Missing the warmth of the horse’s body for the first time, she huddles in a cave, and cannot sleep. Now that the sun has ripped off its heavy blanket of heat, revealing the darkness, she is wide awake. The wind begins to sound like voices.

  She doesn’t know who the voices are or if they are speaking to her.

  Yes, they say, and No, and I’m sorry, and I love you, and Please.

  They go on into longer conversations that she cannot understand and cannot remember. She wraps her dress back around her and holds her knees against her chest, doubting everything, for it seems that no matter where she goes, her loneliness follows her. When she left the island, she had been so sure she would find her prince. She had thought all she would need to do was cross the sea to the mainland, where the empty loneliness of the tower would naturally find its opposite: color and warmth, life and love. Nothing existed on the island, so everything had to exist on the other shore. But how big this shore is, and how complicated by choices! Wasn’t the City the most likely place to find love or at least another human being? That’s where all the people lived, she knew that. It seems to her now that she passed it by not because of Yora or her dreams but out of pure fear. What if, in her f
ear, she avoided the one and only answer?

  You trap yourself… The old woman seemed to say that Lonely herself was controlling everything that happened to her, making all the choices. If she makes the right choices, she will bring back her prince and win her freedom, and if she makes the wrong choices, or believes the wrong things, she will fail! She will be Lonely forever, as the old woman cursed her to be.

  Listen, says the wind.

  “What?” Lonely’s voice bursts from her, rushed and trembling. “Are you talking to me?”

  Nothing speaks to you. You speak to yourself. You hear what you want to hear. I am only an echo.

  Lonely holds her breath, her eyes straining out into the darkness. Somehow she has taken herself far from the colorful live things she saw from high above, and around her now she sees only white earth, pockmarked with holes and scars—bulging with giant earth-flesh as if a great god long ago tossed the desert in his hands, mixed it, and then dumped it in piles of random shape.

  She hears a scratching like fingernails and feels a tickle like cold water over her foot. The whites of her eyes glow as she jumps back and looks down. A lizard the size of her finger has scurried over her, and, despite his hurry, he seems to call out to her.

  this way. where i am warm.