Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The dream felt so good that she tries to fall back into it, but it’s like a magical space that, once she rises out of it, shrinks and will no longer fit her. All she is left with is a terrible thought: But you could not save him. You could not save your father, even though you loved him. The love wasn’t enough.

  She opens her eyes and two elk are standing before her. She is relieved to see someone—anyone—and yet these two seem more reticent than the other animals she’s met with Sky. The female’s head rests lightly upon the male’s shoulder, the two of them facing opposite directions, their bodies just crossed.

  Now the female tilts her head toward Lonely and puffs a white cloud of breath into the air, and Lonely wonders if every cloud in the world might be only someone’s breath. Their eyes are so gentle, as if capable of nothing but peace. They have only been together for a moment, and in a moment they will walk away from each other, to rejoin the herd that stands beyond them. But Lonely feels as if they have been standing this way forever, their two bodies perfectly aligned.

  “Do you know where he is?” she whispers. “Please, I’m so afraid.”

  The female elk’s answer comes in those same small clouds, one after the other. don’t be afraid. we’re all trying to remember where we are. it’s the fear that makes us lost, and tears us apart.

  poor Sky, says the male. he lives in a world that no longer exists.

  and he doesn’t realize it, adds the female.

  “What do you mean?” cries Lonely. “Do you mean that he doesn’t exist, or that I can’t find him, or—?”

  hush, says the female. everything loves you. everything loves him. there is nothing to fear.

  But the effort of communicating seems to have broken their peaceful connection. They curve away restlessly into the wind, and begin to move—fluidly and with a hidden swiftness—across the field.

  “Wait,” Lonely cries, tears suddenly and easily springing from her eyes. She stands up and begins to run. The elk herd scatters and is immediately gone. But she keeps running, then slows to a fast walk when she tires. She walks as hard and fast as she can, crying out his name, her fear turning to fury—and the harder she walks, and the more desperately she searches, the less she sees.

  After sunset, she finds herself back at the lake again, and feels some relief in knowing where she is, though he isn’t here. She sees the white birds on the far side of it, scattered and floating as if at rest, and she wonders if he might be one of them. But she doesn’t think she is allowed to speak to them, even if she could swim out to them, which she has never imagined doing. She never touches the lake, because he doesn’t—at least not as a human—and she feels that he has some fear of it.

  She climbs the peak where the spring begins, and steps onto a cloud. She watches the birds for a long time, wondering about his secrets, remembering that, after all her shared moments with him, she still doesn’t understand who he is or where he comes from. Still he has not spoken to these elders about her, or asked if she can stay. She has avoided asking herself what that means, until now, because it hurts so much.

  As the waxing moon rises over her, Lonely lies on her back and tries to figure out what the fear is, what the pain is. Maybe if she can understand it, it will go away. As soon as she focuses on it, it wails like water in her ears. She fights to stay afloat, and reaches with her eyes for anything solid—an image to hold onto, to steady herself. But there is nothing in the sky to hold onto, except for the moon, and she remembers the story Sky told her about the moon, and it only makes her sad. Then she thinks of the old woman’s curse about the moon losing its child, and she doesn’t understand what she meant, but it all begins to terrify her again, and she closes her eyes.

  But she cannot sleep, and so she gets up and walks on the clouds. They make an unbroken carpet, tonight, over the world. They hang so low over the mountains that the mountain peaks strike right through them, and Lonely can walk onto and off of these islands of stone into unsolid fields of grey mist. These fields extend forever, and the sun is somewhere else, on the other side of the world. She walks with an eerie steadiness over an expanse of silver wisp, evenly illuminated white. Everything is white in a solid container of silver. It is the loneliest, most beautiful thing she has ever seen. If she spoke a single word out loud, that word would become the whole universe and she would die. She hums a little, under her breath. She isn’t even aware that she is walking.

  After a while, she doesn’t feel afraid any more, only terribly sad. She walks across the meadow of white soft nothing, feeling the essential loneliness of being alive, feeling that it will be like this forever, wondering if he feels it too and if that is what drives him into dreams.

  It will amaze her later to remember that somewhere in that infinity, he was able to find her. He comes to her in the early dawn of the next day, and she is so grateful, for a moment, that she collapses in a smile and runs to his arms.

  But she will remember how his hug wasn’t quite long enough to make up for how long he had left her.

  She will remember how he gave no explanation of why.

  You sit up high, in the office cubicle, high up in the City, high up in the air.

  Between your feet and the earth there are: hundreds of square rooms, fifty-one floors made out of something you know the name for but would not be able to explain if you were asked (you won’t be asked), and the distracted bodies, frustrated exhalations, and confused emotions of more people than you know. You are unaware of your hands on the desk, or of the ache in your eyes, or of the strain in your shoulders as you crane your neck forward. If asked (though it will not be), your soul would not be able to say where it is.

  “Our job is to fill the emptiness,” your boss said in the interview before hiring you. “It’s as simple as that. The emptiness is getting bigger and bigger all the time. People feel it, and they don’t want to feel it, and we don’t want them to feel it. So we’re all working together, you see, toward a common goal. People have an endless need for things to do and things to get. That’s what we provide. That’s what advertisement is. Really, we are offering solutions. Endless solutions.”

  High up in the air, you stare at the computer screen. You need a new gimmick for these women’s shoes. Something about sex and love—always sex and love. What do shoes have to do with love? No one you know can find it. Your mind drifts. You are unaware of the corners at each angle of the room, or the difference between the shape of your body and the shape of the cubicle. You are distracted by the bustle and gossip of the employees next door—but please forgive yourself, for they are the only life around you. You are unaware of your own tiredness, unaware that you forgot to eat today. You know that you have a headache, and you take a pill, and drop your head in your hands. You are thinking about a lunch date you had yesterday, with a coworker, in a shopping mall. You miss the shopping mall, your only sense of community. You repeat over and over in your mind the conversation you had over lunch, and your irritation with your coworker, just because it is something to feel.

  Now you play with the image of the Princess in the Tower on your computer. You cannot figure out how to connect it with shoes, and anyway that image is becoming so old and overused. It is getting to be a joke. Why can’t you think up anything new? Why can’t you be creative?

  But you were once, weren’t you? You used to climb up to the sky without elevators, and it was a different sky than this one. When you were a child, very young, your parents and teachers told you how “creative” you were. You could play by yourself for hours and were never bored. You never wondered what to draw or paint. You never wondered what toy to play with next, or what to pretend, or what to imagine. There was a time when you lived in joy. You were always moving. You were always following your ideas and making something wonderful just for the wonder of it.

  Of course, that was a long time ago. You feel pretty old now. Years of school and heartbreak stand between the
n and now. Of your body, you know only what it looks like in the mirror, and you do not like it. Of your imagination, you know only that your paycheck depends upon it, and that it is so elusive these days—no longer your friend.

  So you check your computer for messages. You check all your machines. You pick up each communication device and listen, for the fourth time this morning, for an automated announcement that someone has tried to contact you. You should be working, and yet you cannot stop doing this.

  Please forgive yourself. It is only that you want so much to hear someone say your name again—and know what it means.

  One day Lonely is so angry at Sky’s absence that when she finally sees him at the edge of the lake, she turns and walks fast in the other direction. She hears him call to her, and she keeps walking, up onto the higher rocks. She hears him running.

  “Lonely,” he says, and touches her shoulder. The hesitation in his touch irritates her. She shakes it off and keeps walking.

  “What?” she says.

  “What are you doing? Turn around.”

  “No.” But she turns around in spite of herself. Where would she go? Where would she keep walking to? She hates this place, which goes on forever and goes nowhere—which, according to the animals, is maybe nothing but a dream, and not her dream either.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, and her first reaction at seeing him is sadness—that pain and anger should contort his sweet face, and that she should be the one to cause it.

  “When were you going to come to me? Why do you take so long?” she says tearfully.

  “I’m doing my work, Lonely.”

  “Why can’t you come to me sooner?”

  “Because.” He looks away and shakes his head in frustration. “I just can’t. You can’t depend on me so much.”

  “Why not?”

  The way he looks at her now, she’s scared he is never going to touch her again. “Lonely, I haven’t been with any other people since—I don’t know if I’m ready for this. I’m used to being alone, or being with the animals, the birds. I feel more at home that way.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No, but I don’t want you to be so attached to me. You’ll never understand yourself that way. You’ll never stop being lonely.”

  Lonely is shocked. I thought it was so hard, she thinks, climbing through the wilderness. I could hardly believe I would ever find him, or that he would be real. But finding him wasn’t the hard part at all, and it wasn’t even the answer.

  “Don’t you want to stop feeling lonely?”

  Embarrassed, she looks away. “Don’t talk to me like that,” she snaps. “Like you know everything.”

  He sighs, then begins to walk away.

  She hurries after him. “Okay, but what am I supposed to do? I left the world behind to find you. You hide up here in the clouds. You refuse to come down. I have nothing up here but you!”

  “So get to know the animals. Get to know the mountain.” His voice is cold, and he keeps walking.

  “I do. But—”

  He turns on her, his eyes hot. “What do you want from me? What? Proof of my love? I can’t give it. Either you believe in it or you don’t. I can’t make you any promises. I can’t put you before my people. I don’t want you to hold onto me or think you own me.”

  Lonely looks at him, her dress in handfulls at her sides, trying to be brave. She remembers what Eva said about her father’s wife. How she criticized him. How he pulled away.

  “Sky,” she says, hoping that saying his name will wake them both from the memories and fears they cast upon each other, hazing their clear sight of each other’s hearts.

  He looks at her and his shoulders fall. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner,” he says. He looks tired, tired like she’s never seen him before. But she stares at him, waiting.

  “What?” he repeats sadly. “What do you want?”

  “I want to know you. I want to see where you really come from. This place isn’t even real. I know it isn’t.”

  A look in his eyes tells her to stop, but she keeps going. “Where is that place? The place with the still water, so still the shadows of the trees look solid, and they’re green everywhere, dripping with green. It’s warm there. It’s not like this. I know. I remember.” She feels she will cry—longing for this place she saw in her father’s dreams, this place she and her love were supposed to spend forever together. She feels her father’s heartache for this place. Something was lost there. Her name is there, not “Lonely.” Everything is there.

  “You want to see that place?” he asks, his eyes narrowing. “Is that what you want?”

  She nods, frightened.

  He nods back. “Then we’ll go.”

  Lonely takes the hand he offers, and he leads her to the top of the rock bluff.

  “You’ll have to learn how to fly,” he says abruptly. “There are no clouds to carry us where we’re going today.”

  She stares at him. His eyes soften, but there is still a hint of impatience in his voice.

  “Here,” he says, “Let’s not stand in the snow. The cold is distracting when you’re first trying to lift off the ground—it’s too powerful.”

  He takes both her hands in his. Closes his eyes. Takes a few careful, serious breaths. She has no idea what he’s doing.

  “You have to imagine it first,” he says. “What it would feel like to have air under your feet. You know, you jump, and you don’t come down.”

  Lonely closes her eyes. She imagines jumping. But the rhythm of the jump includes coming down. “But without the down, there’s no up,” she says, confused, feeling his unhappiness and afraid to anger him.

  “Don’t push away from the ground. First feel that you have the ground there, under your feet, and then feel that you have the air there, in the same way as if it were the ground. See? Imagine the ground is gone.”

  Lonely tries again, to please him, but what he’s saying seems impossible to her. She starts to panic. The more she tries to imagine air, the more she feels the ground, hard and pressing into her feet.

  She opens her eyes. Sky drops his hands to his sides and looks at her sternly. “Focus all your energy into yourself. All of your being inside you, not connected to anything else. Pull your feet inside themselves, so they’re not connected to anything.” He rises a little way into the air, his bare feet resting in a casual tilt against nothing.

  Lonely concentrates but she can’t pull herself all the way inside. She’s connected with him, wanting him, wanting to be up there with him even though he is no longer touching her. They stare at each other, not knowing what to do. Sky looks discouraged and a little scared. Lonely wants to apologize for her failure. She’s afraid she’s not right for him, after all. Maybe she doesn’t even want to fly. She feels the safety of the earth, which saved her from the distance of her tower—saved her from the memory of the lonely sea. She feels the security of the earth’s power to hold her close, forever: its pull toward its center. I will never leave you, it said to her, when she first walked through the fields beside her horse. She remembers the way the snake taught her to surrender to its depth. All through her journey, she slept against the earth, and belonged to it over and over again. It is the earth that lifted her, step by step, up to the sky.

  The earth loves her. She knows this. She doesn’t want to let go. But he, her love, is standing there waiting, in the air. And he will leave her. He will lift into the sky.

  Then suddenly the wind comes between them, and she remembers she is also made of this. This air. So much less safe—so much trickier—that she often tries to forget.

  Touching is not the only way to love, it tells her. Sometimes you can love better when you let go.

  It’s the first time the wind has spoken to her since she came here. The voice is so powerful that for an instant she forgets Sky, forgets the ear
th, forgets everything but a sense of wonder that makes her lift her face to meet its caress.

  Her feet part from the earth.

  “Yes!” cries Sky, sounding momentarily happy, and before she can think he grabs her hand and pulls her. They slide along the air, a little above the ground, the wind waving between the grasses and their bellies. Then they sail higher, freedom opening like a great white breath under her chest. They are so much faster, not dependent on the movement of their bodies. The sky doesn’t feel like anything. Clouds and blueness tumble beneath her. They watch the earth sail below, and the whole purpose of flying is to travel over the earth—to see its beauty from another angle, to love it even more.

  Love separates her from the earth, and love holds her close to it, and love is her hand holding Sky’s, and they have both forgotten their fear, their irritation, or their hurt, and they no longer even remember what those feelings were for. They are laughing, and it is the first time in Lonely’s life that she understands how love is everything that breathes and how it is everywhere.