Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The light of the half-moon pours through the forest, and the forest floods around them, the wind above them remembering the sea. As they walk, all the animals of the forest that Delilah knows—the hare, the grouse, the deer, the squirrel, the weasel, the porcupine, the owl—appear in colorless flashes of eye and tail and wing, each one watching expressionlessly as the oldest creature of the forest passes by for the last time. Delilah knows that it was this, too, that caused her such suffering in her life before the desert: that in her whole life, there were no elders. There was no one she could respect. No one to give her any hope that something better lay ahead.

  What would she have done without the desert to save her? What would she have done without these animals who, quietly and without shame or question, offered themselves to her, over and over again, so that she might live?

  Yet the pine forest is a dream. It has been the dream that saved her, her very own dream, and yet a dream that came from beyond her—dreamed by someone or something she cannot understand but is grateful to. Now, walking through these realms of moonlight, she doesn’t know why she has never before seen that it isn’t real.

  by hunting here, you have kept it alive, says the boar, whose body is so real Delilah can feel the connection between his pain and her own—the two bodies aching beside each other, walking the path of pain back to its source, where they will finally let it go. now it is time for you to pass the dream on to someone else—the one who truly carries the responsibility.

  “Am I going to die now?” asks Delilah, who does not feel afraid.

  no. you have already died, and been reborn. now it is my turn, and you will help me, as She helped you. everything is connected.

  Delilah doesn’t have to ask who he means. It must be true. Yora’s cool, restful arms must have slain her with that love she couldn’t fight. That’s why everything feels easier now. That’s why she came to the forest and knelt inside it, even without her dreams to guide her, and told herself she would accept the pain for a little while, and just listen, and try to trust it.

  They come to a river, which Delilah has never seen in this forest, and which flows so slowly here it is almost still.

  The boar looks at Delilah. I am your father, he says.

  Delilah stares at him, unable to take a step further.

  I am your father, he repeats.

  She knows it is true, because she sees a shame in his eyes that she did not see before.

  She looks down. Maybe if she stops looking at those eyes, she won’t have to hear what he has to say. Already there is a trembling in her heart that she hates, a shrinking in her body that dizzies her. She grits her teeth.

  She can hear him anyway. After I die, he says, and you give my body away, I want you to burn this forest down.

  Delilah looks up, bewildered. The trees rock softly in an icy fall wind.

  It’s only a dream, remember? he says. But when you burn it down, it will have a chance to be reborn again, for real.

  She has never heard such gentleness from her father—not directed at her, anyway. And yet she recognizes it. There is some memory from long before all the others, from before Mira was born. Before Mira took up all the world with her suffering, and her father’s suffering, and there wasn’t room for anyone else.

  There is some memory of her father cradling her, Delilah, in his arms. He was singing a song, and he said it was the song of the wind through the pines. From the place where he came from, long ago.

  So this is where his people came from.

  He still smiled then. His eyes were clear.

  My daughter of fire, he says now, I am telling you to burn this forest down. You are the only one who can do it. You are the only one who can release us from our mistakes. You are the only one who can set Mira free from what I’ve done.

  “What did you do?” Delilah says out loud, her voice hard. Something shifts inside her, something vaguely in the shape of fury. But she feels unsure and cannot quite muster it.

  The boar only nods his head, as if she’s just answered what he needed to know with her very defiance. He turns and walks a little way along the river, and Delilah follows, her body suddenly full of pain again. Even her feet hurt from the rawness of the ground.

  The boar lies down in a thicket of flowers.

  Hold me, he says, if you’re willing.

  Delilah finds herself kneeling down, and then leaning her head on the great shoulders, like a child, wrapping her arms around the hugely breathing body.

  Sometimes, after she hunted an animal and the arrow went in, she was able to come quickly enough to the animal’s side to feel the spark of life just before it went out. This time, she is given many moments to rest on the simple rise and fall of life, before the breath stops.

  “But this is the forest of your people,” she whispers.

  But it’s already been destroyed. They already destroyed us. And we kept passing on that destruction to our children, ashamed of ourselves for what they had done to us, powerless to stop it. Now we must take the power of destruction back into our own hands, and make it a rebirth. We must let go of the dream of what was lost, and reclaim ourselves. You, daughter, will do this.

  They feel like echoes of words he once spoke, in real life, long ago when he was her father. As if he warned her, long before she was old enough to understand. As if he spoke to her as he rocked her to sleep, knowing that one day he would forget, knowing that one day he would no longer be able to trust his own flawed, human self to remember.

  The deep rise and fall of the boar’s body feels so good. Like it doesn’t matter if she never eats again, or makes love to another man.

  I was always afraid of you, whispers her father. I was always afraid you would look into me with those eyes of fire, and know the truth.

  Delilah dreams of a spiral winding round and round, each circle passing the same points of time in the same places, winding deeper into its own story, deeper and deeper into the relief of darkness. She is following the spiral of a pinecone. And in each hidden pocket of truth, in each point of the spiral, passing itself again and again, drawing on its own history for sustenance, is a seed. That seed needs fire to germinate. Everything else must be destroyed. The parent tree. The cone. The past. Even the spiral itself.

  Now please, kill me, says her father.

  Delilah takes up her knife, and slips it into the boar’s heart. She can feel it going in—the tough skin, the brittle bone, and then, inside, the wild softness of the heart, which opens instantaneously, as if it had been waiting its whole life to give in.

  Delilah looks up as the boar dies, and there is the girl, sitting quietly across the river. It is the girl who fled from Dragon with the Unicorn, only there is no Unicorn now. The girl is naked and skinny, her bony knees drawn up to her chest. Her eyes are hollow and she doesn’t seem to see Delilah, though she is looking right at her. Delilah stands up and walks toward her, her legs shaking. She crosses the river. The water is colder than the river in the desert.

  She emerges into a forest she does not know. A forest thick and confusing, where the moonlight gives in to blackness. The leaves are moist and tender around her as she stands over that white mirror of herself, the bloody knife still clutched in her left fist. She looks down at the pale, fragile head of this princess—so helpless, and yet so beloved by Dragon and by every man in the world—and for a moment she feels hatred shine through her like a familiar dawn. Then it goes, and she kneels down before the girl, whose eyes struggle now to meet hers. Delilah sees the hunger there, the desperation. And she knows suddenly that the path ahead of this girl is far more difficult than her own. She herself has already battled her greatest demons. That’s why she feels so old now.

  “I’m trying to find my beloved,” the girl tells Delilah, her eyes tearing up. “But I’m too human. I’m going to die.”

  “Not yet,” says Delilah. “I’ve ki
lled a boar for you. It’s going to feed you until you get where you are going.”

  Delilah isn’t sure the girl understands. She keeps staring at Delilah, her paleness strange in the darkness. “Where do you come from?” she asks finally.

  “From the other side of the river,” says Delilah. “This river is a dream we share. Yora. Remember?”

  “Yes. I remember….”

  “We’re always across the river from each other, whether we like it or not. And for the next seven nights, I’m going to be here with this animal that I’ve killed, helping its spirit pass into the next world. Each of those nights I will cross the river to you, in your dreams, and share its meat with you. Okay?”

  “But why?”

  “Because once—” She hesitates. “Because once, your Unicorn saved me.”

  The girl shakes her head. “She’s not my Unicorn,” she says.

  “Well this isn’t my meat,” says Delilah. “So this has nothing to do with either of us, then. Nobody owes anybody anything.”

  Maybe it is easier to come down than it was to go up. Easier to fail, and to finally give in to what one feared.

  I can hear her thoughts. They are inside me. The whole world is inside me, and the whole world is Lonely.

  All around her a beautiful kingdom goes up in flames of color, but she feels like it was made for someone else. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her. She finds herself longing for it faintly, as if she gazes at it through a window, as if she does not have what it takes to experience it. Her senses are sleeping.

  Something in me knows what that’s like.

  As the way gets easier, and the slope downward less steep, she begins to speak out loud.

  “Maybe he never really loved me,” she murmurs first. “Maybe that witch knew it, that whatever might seem like love is just a dream and has no proof.”

  But she can’t bear the silence after that.

  So then she says, “Maybe he loved me, but I pushed too hard to get him to promise. But why wasn’t I enough for him? Why wasn’t I as real to him as the birds? Why couldn’t he have spoken to me in the end, or even said goodbye? I came to rescue him. I was supposed to rescue him.”

  I carry her, and I carry her words as she speaks them. Her words fall into my listening like snow. The words are not important, but when they fall into my heart, I remember my heart, and they become something else. It comforts her, to speak them. This time of grief: this is the most sacred time.

  “Maybe I’m being selfish. Maybe I’ve always been selfish, like the Witch said. Maybe….” I know what she doesn’t say. Maybe that old Witch is inside me after all. It is what she fears more than anything: that she is not that image of sweet innocence her father made of her, not that bright goddess of unconditional love that Sky needed her to be. Rather there is a desperation inside of her, a need so terrible in its own ugly fear—

  And yes, I know what that’s like, too.

  The sunlight in the cold is thin, though sometimes it murmurs in patches of mellow warmth and looks like summer again. Lonely looks down at the leaf-strewn ground, her sadness so soft, her eyes welling up with the mystery of a love so beautiful—even in its pain—that she thinks she could have spent a lifetime following it, and would never have tired of exploring his depths. She wants to tell him how all the leaves are falling from the trees, and ask him why.

  It’s so cold now. Sometimes, when we stop to rest, she buries herself under dead leaves to keep warm.

  I don’t know why I began this journey, carrying Lonely. When I began it, at the edge of the sea, I was not aware of myself. Now, as we ride together back down, and I translate her feelings into words, I remember more and more. I remember again the wholeness of love, and the sacredness of what I am made for. I remember again the darkness that made me.

  “I wish I could tell you what loving you feels like,” she whispers, as if he is here. “So big! How could it come to nothing?”

  Sometimes the force of the question makes her look so sharply at the world around her. And then the world turns on its axis of reality, and catches the light of that close, sad, curious autumn sun which leans low over the treetops now, concentrated in a little ball like a swollen heart. Yellow leaves somersault in that light, and the world is silent, moist, and intimate, and she feels that mystery all around her that used to thrill her mind with hope before she met him—and she almost believes that he is here somewhere, close by, if only she could recognize what form he has taken. She feels the sun’s closeness, and feels that closeness within herself, that question of who and what she is in this empty universe, and why, and what for. The universe is so vast but the question is close!

  She is riding on my back but her face is all around me, and her sorrow is so precious to me—that helpless, good, earnest sorrow—and I want to explain to her what has happened, but I cannot.

  Then we walk beneath a cloud, and she is alone again—estranged even from herself, even from me. And I am only an animal, and yet I am more than animal. Where I come from, I must return to, to be reborn into a new life. But where I come from is paved over and gone now. Sky flies in search of it, endlessly, in the wrong direction. The child that dreamed me—she, too, was lost. Somehow, it is only Lonely’s journey that can take me back home.

  I alone see how everything—the whole world—is personal. A simple love, a simple desire, a simple pain. One little girl was torn open, and because I am her soul now, I cannot shine, and because I cannot shine, the whole world suffers. One man built a whole kingdom out of his simple human lust, his grief, his wounded pride. And now this one girl who rides me will mend the world back together if she can only mend the inner fabric of her own self. I alone see her courage. I need that courage—that courage she has to keep loving, even when hurt. That’s the only way the world can become whole again.

  Lonely feels the world through her love for Sky. Her love is big and complex, like an ecosystem of life. She knows, in her soul, that Sky was afraid. She wants to comfort him, to hold him close, to relieve him of the fear of her own love. She wants to help him. She wants to follow him in his search for his people. She would do anything for him—she would go with him anywhere.

  Yet she feels the grief of her father again. The way he just stopped coming, and she never knew why. The way she lay on her bed night and day, with nothing to keep her company but dreams, tied to the bed with a sorrow as strong as ropes—a sorrow she did not recognize because he had told her she was not human, and could not feel. A pain she did not know about, until the nightmares came.

  I understand that, too—the kind of love that can trap you. It becomes your fate, and you feel you never got to decide, and then it betrays you.

  At night she lies down under the leaves, exhausted by her thoughts. She doesn’t know where she is. She looks into the black starry sky between bare trees and wonders if he is still traveling into other people’s dreams. Desperately, she wills herself to fall asleep and dream of him. Her desperation keeps her awake for hours, during which she cries continuously, knowing with total honesty that she has no way of reaching him. That she might never see him again. That there is nothing she can do—nothing. No way to speak with him, to call to him. Only the weight of that despair is heavy enough to drag her finally into the relief of sleep.

  She dreams only of Delilah.

  Those arms are slippery and tough, and they will not comfort Lonely, but they give her what she needs to survive. The hair around those burning eyes is wild and thorny, but in those eyes there is peace now. In that food, Lonely feels the dark blood of her own need pump through her: instinctual, mammalian, and determined—so strong she cannot doubt its validity, or wonder at its purpose. In that food she swallows the shock of her own self, and the freedom in it—her own stubborn path onward, her own will to survive. In that food she tastes the sweet weakness of sorrow, and in the hours she sleeps she gives in to it, and i
n the morning she wakes slowed and centered, her mind cold but clear.

  Delilah gives her the skin of the boar to keep her warm, and the meat warms her inside. Every night in this dream which is real, Delilah makes a fire, and Lonely watches her as she twists the little pieces of the trees between her fast, hot hands.

  They talk a little. Delilah explains to her the mystery of bleeding. It’s normal, she says. It happens every moon. It doesn’t matter, really.

  “Is there anyone you love?” asks Lonely once.

  “Yes,” says Delilah, without elaborating. Her eyebrows are black and rich, shadowing her eyes.

  “You live with Dragon, in the desert?”

  “No. I live alone.”

  “But—”

  “Dragon can stay or go. I don’t care. I’ve lived where I live for seven years, alone.”

  “Are you happy?”

  Delilah blows on the newborn flame, making it disappear for a moment, and then appear again like magic, this time bigger. “Happy,” she mutters, and seems to think.

  Lonely admires the serious lines of her face, the certainty in her muscles. Every motion she makes seems independent of the things around it, and yet intensely comfortable among them.

  “But whom do you love?” she presses.

  Delilah looks up, as if she’d forgotten Lonely was there. “I don’t know,” she says. “What’s love, anyway? People throw that word around like they know what they’re talking about.”

  “I think maybe my love is selfish,” says Lonely.

  Delilah shrugs, spears a slab of meat with a stick. “So be selfish,” she says. “Selfishness is the only way I’ve survived. If you don’t take care of your own needs, no one else will.” And she feeds Lonely with neither warmth nor coldness, neither compassion nor resentment—at least not that Lonely can see. But once Sky said, If you ever see her in a dream, make sure to accept the love she offers. She needs you to do that.