Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I don’t know how I did this. Except that I found out, in that moment, that inside of Fear is courage. As if because I was the keeper of this emotion, Fear, I was also the only one brave enough to enter. I felt that for the sake of the others, I had to lead the way. I stepped forward, and felt the water pulling me down.

  “I’m glad I didn’t know what would happen or I would never have gone. In a second I had completely lost the ground, I couldn’t tell which way was up, I was spinning and the spiral overcame me. Everything was dark and the water became icy cold, so cold I was afraid I would disappear. I was reaching and clawing at nothing, feeling all alone. I thought I was drowning. It seemed to go on and on like that—pure terror—until I realized that I wasn’t drowning, that I could breathe down there in that blackness, and that the others were in there, too, except we were all spinning with no control over our bodies and could not reach each other. Then finally there was a stillness; we were floating there as if lost together in the night sky. It was so quiet, and in that blackness, Rye, I saw the most terrible things. It was so still, but these images came at me, slow and horrifying, and it made me feel like we were floating in the eye of some storm, and that at any moment the Fear would come blowing in again so intensely it would kill me.

  “I can’t remember everything I saw. There was Kite lying dead, of course. But there were other images, too, that were not mine. There was a baby all alone and starving, screaming in a dark cave, and then there were footsteps coming, but whoever came wasn’t its mother and was angry. There was this feeling of falling, endlessly. There was this little girl with madness in her eyes—like her soul had left her—tearing out her hair and rocking and clawing her face. There was a man with that same madness in his eyes, throwing glass bottles against a wall next to a woman’s face and yelling. There was a monster leaping out of black water and devouring a woman in an explosion of blood. Throngs of people wailing and reaching. And there were things I didn’t understand, too, because they didn’t seem like they should be frightening. The sound of someone quietly crying or an image of someone reaching out her hand—whether to plead or to offer love, I could not tell. Everything felt eerie and awful. And I knew somehow that these images were all the fears of the women around me.

  “But instead of something horrible happening, nothing ever happened to us. Only these frightening images and ideas floated by, and then nothing. Amidst them, I could hear Yora’s voice: ‘What is this, Fawn? What is Fear?’ At some point she was there with me, passing the magic substance of this emotion back and forth between our hands. I thought it would be cold but now it was hot. When it touched my hands, it seemed to change form.

  “I was surprised to find that I could speak again. I said ‘Fear is when you stand on the edge of change, on the edge of the unknown. It’s how you know you are moving.’

  “I looked at Delilah and I saw that Fear is fire—unpredictable, destructive, and changing everything it touches—but also it is that spark of life itself. It is what makes us go forward, what makes us know we are alive. I looked at Lonely and saw that Fear is air—that abyss, that nothingness—but it is also freedom. I looked at Yora and saw that Fear is water, that terror of fast surrender, that fast falling into the unknown. But also how good it felt, to let go. I remembered those first thunderstorms in the wilderness—when all the elements came together—and how my body felt free and alive for the first time, and how for the first time I knew what God was and what I was. I remembered the first time you touched me.

  “I don’t even know if I said all this aloud. But then Lonely cried out to me, ‘What can we do, when we’re afraid? Eva said I must not be afraid. But I’m afraid!’ And I said to her—and this is how it was like a dream, Rye, the way I said things I wouldn’t have said in real life, wouldn’t have known to say, and I don’t know why I said them, but they seemed right—I said, ‘Before you can let go of Fear, you have to learn how to fear. You have to learn the power of Fear. That is the gift I have to give you.’

  “She said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I could see her now again, wherever we were, and touch her. I said, ‘Have you ever been lost in a world you didn’t understand, not knowing what to do or where to go, but letting your instincts guide you the best you could?’ And she said, breathing a little more calmly now, ‘Yes, that has been my whole journey.’ I said, ‘That was the power of Fear. It made you stop thinking. It forced you to act on your instincts, and your instincts were always right. Did your fear ever stop you from doing something that wasn’t right for you?’ And she said ‘Yes, with Dragon. Yes, at the fire circle, with Coyote.’ We were standing again now, our heads clear above the river, the water down around our bellies. She said, ‘But sometimes Fear haunts me. Sometimes it keeps me from someone I love; sometimes it keeps me from trusting him and makes me lose him.’ Then she started to cry. I said, ‘Fear is also courage. Look for it there. Inside the Fear is courage. That same whirring, dizzy churning that makes you afraid can rise up inside you and make you leap. If you face your fear, it will make you powerful. Didn’t you ever face your fear?’ She looked at me with wonder, and in her eyes I saw an old woman with a terrible face, and then the black sea rising up, and she said slowly, ‘Yes. I did. Or I would never have left the island.’

  “Then I took her in my arms, and I held her close, and I could feel my own warmth, my own depth holding her deep. I said, ‘When you don’t understand Fear, when you cannot find the answers inside it because it has tricked you into thinking it is bigger than you are, then come home to the Earth. Come home to the Earth.’ Now we could feel the firm stones beneath the river again, holding our feet and carrying the river forever.

  “I said, ‘The Earth reminds us to go slow, one step at a time.’ Then I looked at Delilah, and she was still now, staring at me. It wasn’t contempt I saw there after all, but Fear itself.

  “Then Lonely and I stepped apart, and I saw the new determination in Lonely’s eyes, like she’d already started on that journey, wherever she was going.”

  Fawn looks at Rye now, almost afraid to continue, and yet feeling the thrill of her own fear. “Rye, it’s true. Emotions are like this magic we are given, that can give us so much power if we understand it and know how to use it, but that can destroy us—and everyone we love—if we don’t.”

  Rye nods again, his eyes wide. “What happened to Lonely?” he says.

  “That’s the part that seems really terrible, but I think maybe now I understand.” She looks at the anxiety in his face and feels a little of the old envy, but mostly she feels sorry, that what she has to tell now might frighten him.

  “Yora turned to this girl of fire. The moon lit Delilah up, and I saw how really powerful she was, only her power was too much for her, and it hurt her somehow. Yora said, ‘What emotion do you bring, Lil?’

  “Delilah looked back at her, and she was flicking little stones hard into the river, and she said stubbornly, ‘You already know.’

  “Yora said, ‘But I do not know. I do not understand it. I feel it—everyone gives it to me—but I do not understand what it is. What is it for? Where does it come from?’

  “We waited a long time and Delilah wouldn’t answer. Then finally she said quietly, ‘I won’t talk about where it comes from. It’s what keeps me safe, so I don’t have to talk about it.’

  “‘Then all you have is Fear,’ said Yora.

  “Then Delilah exploded, and I realized I’d seen it coming all along, and that’s why I was so afraid of her. She threw her words in red fire across the water, and they burned all of us. I don’t remember the details of all she said—about how we didn’t understand her, how she didn’t ask to be here, how she didn’t need us and didn’t need Yora, how she didn’t need anything. She used words I’d never heard before—hard, hate words that were meant to hurt. Then she turned the fire on Lonely, and she told her she was selfish, that she thought she was a princess, that her father had taken everything
from Delilah’s people and ruined Delilah’s father, and many other things. Only she didn’t say them like that; she said them in ways I can’t repeat. Cruel ways, although when I think of it now, I feel more sorry for her than for Lonely. She seemed in so much pain.

  “As she yelled, the water swirled up around her, harder and harder, and swirled around all of us like a great storm, so that I had to hold onto myself to keep from being washed away—I had to hold onto the Earth, and close my eyes to keep the Fear from killing me, and try to remind myself that this was fire, which I needed to live.

  “Yora said, in the stillness inside all this whirling, so that somehow we could hear her, ‘So Anger is need. Only need.’ She sighed and sounded very sad. I looked at Lonely and, to my surprise, she didn’t look hurt by Delilah’s words. She looked like I had felt when I saw the swirling water which was Fear itself in front of me—as if relieved that something she’d always feared was finally being revealed to her.

  “But now Delilah was sitting down on a little stone and holding her face in her hands. She shook her head, not looking up, and murmured, ‘No, no, it’s more than that. It’s what makes us strong. It’s what helps us survive.’

  “Yora said gently, ‘Who is us?’

  “Delilah didn’t answer that, but she shook her head again and said, ‘Anger is all I have.’

  “Yora said, ‘These other women here—we have other emotions, besides Anger. If you will teach us the power of Anger, we will give you these gifts in return. Then you will have other powers and other tools to use as you wish, not only Anger.’

  “Delilah looked up at her. Yora held out her hands to her, as if asking for this gift. So finally Delilah closed her eyes and screamed, louder than you’ve ever heard anyone scream—not even human, but like the way a wolf howls to call its people home. As she screamed, the waters rose up and engulfed us all, but before I had time to feel afraid, the Fear turned into—”

  She pauses here, smiling to herself, pressing her face into one hand.

  “The Fear turned into—I guess you’d call it passion. Like when you know exactly what you want and you’ll do anything to get it, and the power of your own desire and certainty is so big, you have absolutely no fear that anything will stop you. And nothing will hurt you—nothing will ever hurt you. I was so afraid of her fire as that water came rolling toward me, but once it was inside of me, I felt safe for the first time since I can remember. I felt safe because I understood my own anger. I understood my own fury at having to live in fear, and at what is done to my life that is not in my control, and I felt like a mountain lion—I felt like the strongest, wildest beast, Rye, knowing that nothing would stop me from trying to keep my children safe and keep the home I love safe. I knew what I wanted, too. I wanted the beauty of these mountains to embrace me forever, and I wanted to see Kite and Chelya grow up happy, and I wanted you inside of me.”

  She lowers her eyes, courage burning her face, her body tensed as if to spring. She feels, from across the space between them, the curious, animal hardening of Rye’s body—cold, almost calculating in its rising, though tentative, desire. But neither of them, right now, can move. How long ago, she wonders, did they lose track of each other like this? How long since they’ve made love? What was it about Kite’s loss that made her forget who her husband was—or did it only make her realize that she never really knew?

  “But when the scream was over,” she continues, her story like a lifeline now, the only real thing to carry them both forward through the pain of that question, “Delilah was still and calm, like she had not been all this time. She came forward to Lonely and she pulled out a sword. I don’t know where it came from. It was like this was her dream now, and I was only watching from some strange other place. Her voice was eerily calm, like something that did not belong to her, though her eyes were still blazing. She said to Lonely, ‘Do you know what Anger feels like, my white mirror?’ That’s what she called her. It was like this ritual they both knew, somehow.

  “Lonely answered, her whole body tensed now, her teeth clenched, her face unlike I’d ever seen it: ‘Yes! I am angry for all the ways they try to define me and use me that are NOT ME. At my mother who hates me for the pain and loss I represent to her, at my father who locked me up for the ideal he wanted to make me, at the people who left me lonely there because I was only a dream to them, and at Sky who left me because of how I reminded him of something he lost long ago that he wasn’t brave enough to try for again. I’m angry at this curse that was placed on me, that DOES NOT BELONG TO ME, and at this name which IS NOT MY NAME and for never ever being able to reach the love I long for! And I’m angry at YOU, for hating me, for all your resentment, for all your blindness to who I really am.’

  “Delilah heard all this, not moving, her expression unchanging, and then she spoke back. She stood straight and tall for the first time.

  “‘Anger is your self trying to become better than what you were,’ she said.

  “‘Anger is your own true power longing to grow, longing to stand up inside you. I tell you this now, and if you don’t hear me now, you will never hear me. Don’t use it against anyone else, and don’t use it against yourself. Use it to blaze a path, and use it to blaze a space around you that protects you. If it ever gets so hot it burns you, look inside yourself, be still, and find that flame that burns in you. When you see that, there is no need to feel angry, because you won’t feel helpless any more. You will see that flame, and feel only—amazement.’ Then Delilah said to her, though maybe she said it for herself, ‘Use it to free yourself of what you were. Use it to cut away all those expectations, all those ideals, all those fakes that people placed over who you really were. When you’re free, you can shapeshift into anything.’

  “This is the terrible part. I want to say it was a dream, but it was not. Delilah lifted up her sword and sliced right through Lonely’s body. I mean, all the way through. Lonely broke apart like she was made of clay, and then she broke again, and again. Into pieces—but it wasn’t like you would think. That’s why it was like a dream, in a way. There wasn’t any blood that I can remember, and it didn’t hurt me to watch. It only frightened me when I came out of the river later, and tried to remember it. Yes, I remember now, it seemed completely right at the time. Because that wasn’t the real Lonely. There were pieces of her scattered now, but they weren’t like bloody pieces of a body, they were like—like shattered shards of glass. And then they became, I don’t know, like things of nature. Branches, feathers, old dry bones, tears. But they were still Lonely. Her spirit was still in those things or rising out of those things, somewhere, and could speak, though I don’t know where the voice came from. Delilah sat down on the stone and laid her head on her arms. The whole time we were there, I don’t know if she ever lifted her eyes again. I felt so sorry for her, for what she had had to do. I thought she was so brave, and I wanted to tell her so, but I couldn’t seem to move.”

  Fawn looks at Rye and his eyes are closed now, but she can tell he is listening, though he is barely breathing. She used to see him sit like this sometimes, long ago when he came home and found that his mother had died, and he was slowly deciding within himself not to travel ever again. She used to watch him shyly sometimes, from behind the trees, her heart filling with wonder for the mystery of this man she had chosen to love.

  “Yora’s gift was Sorrow,” she says now. “Yora was the river, flowing over Lonely, healing her, turning those pieces into liquid so that they bled together and were one again—but still without form, something we could not really see now but only sense around us. Yora said to her, ‘You already know Sorrow. But do you trust it yet? Let it carry you. When it comes, all you can do is give in.’

  “And there was Delilah crying on the rock with her head in her arms, and me looking on silent, not knowing why I was there. Lonely was a rainbow, or a school of silver fish, or a shadow of something passing over or under—something in the water t
hat kept coming and coming, going and going. I really did understand, then, how sometimes we are helpless after all, and we have to accept that. Sometimes we have to let go, not understanding what the pain is for or why we’re alive, and simply wait. In the images of that water, shifting in the moonlight, I felt I could see all of Lonely’s journey. I didn’t see her; instead I saw her reflected in the lands she’d passed through. Landscapes of sorrow. The black silence under the sea and the silver quiet of the waves on the surface, with nothing to break against. Long, slow rain in a field. Even the shapes of these mountains, as they fall into shadow. The lonely sky, with a single bird flying through it, lost in grey clouds. You know how every landscape, every shape, holds a different emotion—makes you feel different things. You know how it is. I remember, too, the places we traveled through to come here, when I was a child. It’s been so long I’d almost forgotten.

  “Lonely had traveled so far. To me it seemed as if that broken list of memories was in itself creating her sorrow. Just having so much past, so much she’d walked through and would never see again—so much to make sense of, and none of it making any sense.

  “But Lonely’s voice came through the dream of that river and said, ‘I thank the land, for carrying my emotions for me before I ever knew what they were. I thank the sea for carrying my grief when I could not yet feel it. I thank the desert for carrying my passion when I did not yet know what to do with it. I thank the forests for keeping my secret fears before I was ready to face them, and the mountains for holding my love before I knew how to express it, and the sky for holding my dreams even when I did not always believe in them.’

  “Inside myself I suddenly felt all my love for Lonely, all the feelings she had brought me—that were brought to life in me since I met her—and I thought to myself, ‘But you are made of air, so free! Air and fire, they have no trouble shape-shifting at all. Become whatever you want. Why let sorrow pull you down?’