Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Sky and Lonely, two chemicals that no one will remember. Coming together for no reason, yet desperately. Each one a single heartbeat of magic, a universe of layered wisdom, like a word.

  The first word. The first story. Life is that which passes itself on, told and retold. Life is that which carries a message, where the message is carried on. It happens in the sea, where the fluid of that original love-making still swirls. Sky and Lonely float in that dream. How easy it is! There are no questions, no needs. Yet he wants her. Why? Why does he bump against her; why does he change his shape around her; why does he engulf her smaller form inside his larger one now?

  She settles in there, inside him. Now they are a single cell. He is the being, living and dying. She is the knowing inside the being, the nucleus, the brain—who remembers him and why they are here. Who remembers where they come from, and the story that must be passed on.

  We’ll live in the mud, he says. And they live there, in the black bliss of the deepest earth at the bottom of the deepest sea, and their descendants will live there forever—exact replicas of themselves—until the world ends.

  In their next life, they recognize each other. They are two different cells, and yet they remember: once they were the same. They want to be one again. They merge their bodies, but in the process they become something else—something that does not remember who they were, and can feel no satisfaction in the union, and does not know that it itself is love.

  Now all the cells are merging, each to each, and each one comes out different. The more they come together, the more new different ones are born. So the more they join, the more they become endlessly diverse; the more they try to become one, the more differentness arises, until they are millions upon millions, and none of them the same.

  The cells form a community, and Sky is a cell in the brain. Then he is the brain, and he forgets that he is also the cells in the brain. He forgets that Lonely is a cell in the stomach, and that both of them function to create a life greater than their individual selves. He thinks he is the brain, and he thinks he is the identity of that thing, who decides, who moves, who wants and takes. He forgets what makes up his kingdom, what makes him what he is.

  And this is only the beginning of that forgetting.

  Now they are both whole creatures, not knowing what makes them up, not knowing what they are. Lonely is round like a flying saucer. Sky is a leaf, long before there are any trees, living unattached to anything in the debris of the ocean floor. Both of them are busy changing the energy of the elements into life. They are doing the new work of the universe: transformation. They flicker at each other in passing. They have no relation to each other. But don’t they? They seem to remember something. A time when they were the same, when they were part of the same, when they were one. A vague yearning pulls them closer.

  Or maybe it is just the ocean current, which is moved by the shifting of the earth, and the winds, and the moon.

  The first hunger is not beautiful. The first predator is neither stealthy nor clever. Lonely is nothing but a giant mouth, and the mouth has no jaw, and can never close. She scoops in the worms from the ocean floor, and Sky is one of them, but she is never full: she wants him again and again and again.

  In her next life she is only hungrier. She is a giant mouth full of teeth. He has legs now, and a hard shell, and he is starting to dig.

  Desire and fear. Reaching toward and pulling away. Three hundred and fifty billion years, and what else is there?

  She is pretty this time, a soft cup with waving pink arms. He is invisible, climbing the tides.

  She has claws now, and her claws are bigger than her body. She has a shell, because now there is something that she fears, too. He digs down deeper, and in digging, finds there is food to be found in the soft black water-earth to feed his own hunger.

  In his next life, he stalks her. But she can no longer be found. She is a fish climbing the underbelly of the shore, wondering at the light on the surface with her new eyes and her new brain. Or she is everywhere, a city of coral. Or she is the water itself, just for the sake of holding him.

  He is a shark and she is a lobster; she is a horseshoe crab, and he is a tiny fish. In each life they devour each other without love, only need. They do not recognize each other; they only recognize the hunger.

  Now they are two land masses, two worlds, drifting together so slowly that the ocean cannot feel it, yet unstoppably. When they collide, the whole world shakes. The sea falls apart around them, leaving shallow pools.

  Life out of the womb is hard. In a land of barren white stone and barely living soil, the first creature, tiny and creeping low on six legs, must grow its walls thicker to withstand the sun. It’s food will not flow into it without work; it must climb. Lonely is a tree with scales like a lizard, green from top to bottom and perfectly vertical with two furred arms. She knows only the sun, the rain, and the earth.

  She does not know about Sky, who is a herd of insects that gallops almost accidentally onto the sandy shore, leaving the first footprints ever made.

  Or Lonely is the sea, who sighs without him, whose children one by one are leaving her to colonize the new world.

  Each soul is on its own now.

  Two amphibians: their heads in the air, their tails in the sea.

  They are like snakes, their heads shaped like arrows. Sky wants to get close to her, but the only way it can be done is by creating something together. She lays her eggs; he blesses them with his magic. They swim over the eggs together, not touching. Their children hatch, swim until they are older, and then trek out onto the land to seek their sustenance. Their children and their children’s children will continue to re-enact this transformation—childhood to adulthood, water to land—over and over, long after all the other creatures of the earth have chosen one element or the other. And they will never touch.

  But they keep reaching for each other, reborn and born again. Now the earth, too, is changing. Here are the first trees with needles like rain. Here is the first thicket of green ferns, but with no lovers to lie down inside it—except for the insects, who own the world because they are the toughest, with their skeletons on the outside.

  Lonely and Sky are becoming reptiles. Sky wants to reach the eggs while they are still inside her. He wants to feel in there, what it’s like at the very beginning—where he comes from. He can no longer remember the sea, and the dryness of the world hurts him. He climbs over her as she slinks away. He reaches in. He places himself inside her, inside the ocean in there—and he leaves himself there. You will remember me now, he says harshly. Not just the egg, but you. You will remember me.

  Now Sky is a tree, living older than trees have ever lived before. After he forks once, he forks again, each fork forking. Each choice leads to more choices; each pathway leads to more answers. Life is becoming more complicated, and the older you get, the more things cannot be simply one way or the other. Now he has a hundred tiny branches. He and the other trees make a new world up there, a new landscape under the sky, and under them a new world of darkness is born.

  But the earth is still restless and young, and nothing lasts. The rains have no seasons, and the earth itself often moves. Lonely is sudden fire, and she loves him. She wants him, and she destroys him—and everything in her path—in the taking. He grew so old, so complicated; but her hunger is so brief and so simple.

  One day no one will remember the insects. People will crush them under their feet and hate them. But the insects are the only ones who survive everything. They are too small to be destroyed. Lonely is a dragonfly, the first animal to take to the element of air. She doesn’t know her wings are made of rainbows. She doesn’t know that Sky is the wind, and that when she leaps, it is he who catches her.

  In their next life, they are two dragon friends, both female, who raise their children together in a small community in the jungle, on the edge of a pond. They stand on two leg
s like people and have graceful, armored heads. Every evening they watch the sunset together, and talk about how it feels as if things are changing—their time is coming to an end—and one day, no one will remember who they were. People will think they were stupid, that their blood ran cold, that they were ugly and slow. When the mammals take over the world, no one will remember that dragons had culture and highly developed intuitions, that they sat in council together and talked about how to keep peace in the world, that they respected their elders, passed down songs, and ran races through complicated mazes of trees. People will say that they were vicious.

  In his next life Sky is a salamander, and Lonely is a turtle who sees him, once in her life, beneath her reflection in a pool. When he moves, she is so startled that she snaps shut into her shell. She is still haunted by memories of dragons, and they have made her jumpy. When she peers out again, many moments later, he is gone.

  The mammals are still living in secret. They live small and silent under the leaves, invisible to the big reptiles, and their secret is this: blood whose temperature they can keep constant, regardless of the world around them. Even at night, when the reptiles are sleeping, their bodies are warm enough to move: to scurry, to climb, to attack and escape. So they live in the night, laughing slyly with the moon their only witness, about their secret autonomy. The world does not affect me, thinks Lonely, running warm in her fur. She is a primeval mouse. And she has another secret. She is going to make her own baby inside her body, and she doesn’t need to lay an egg on the ground—she doesn’t need the earth to hold it, no: she will hold it herself. She will carry it wherever she goes, and it will belong to her, and it will be safe until it hatches inside her, and even then she will keep carrying it. She is smarter than the reptiles—her warm blood allowing her brain to grow bigger—and she chews her food with teeth, so it can feed her faster. She smiles in the darkness as she receives her child in a quick rush of blood. He looks exactly like her. He is Sky, and he is the same as her. They are the same flesh. She can even make her own food for him, from her own body! She does not need the earth. She owns herself. She owns her child. Delirious with her own power, she devours him before he is a day old.

  Lonely is a flower. The first flower! The animals all make love now; why cannot the plants? She opens herself to that longing: all color, all softness, all sweetness. She knows the secret—why all the animals long for each other, long to place themselves each inside the other. It is so that they can give each other the message of who they are. And she has a message from her own tree; she wants to give that message to another.

  Sky is an insect, crawling along her lips. Come, she says, for she is so open, so full of love to give, that she’d welcome anyone. He slips in. He is hungry. He is searching for something that has no name. He drinks from her but it doesn’t hurt her; her love is boundless, and cannot be diminished. When he leaves her, he feels her love all over his body. He carries it to another. And so love is carried, without even trying. Both Lonely and Sky, the flower and the insect, serve each other without meaning to, simply by following the truth of their own longing.

  The sea is almost unrecognizable now. Sharks and dangerous fish prowl in its shadows. Fish form societies inside giant clams. Sea turtles feel as if they are flying. The wisest creatures in the sea are quiet, shelled creatures with elaborate scripture on their coiled spirals, each one different than the other. Sky is one of these, and Lonely is the sea, who is always sad, and finally has someone to talk to. She teaches him nostalgia and tells him of all the eras she has seen pass, all the creatures who have left her, forgetting the smooth swells that once carried them. He listens, and he loves her. But she knows that one day soon, all of his people, too, will die out, and only their fragile imprints will remain under layers of dry stone. This conversation will be forgotten, buried under layers of history.

  Everything is different now. The mammals are growing large on the land. Plants are so lush that the earth steams and darkens. There are cats now, and hooves and feathers, and animals with eyes on the fronts of their heads, so that their left and right brains can converse. The whole earth is warm. But the land masses have split apart again, and animals who once knew each other by name are separated—never to see each other again, never to remember that time when the world was one and dragons kept the peace.

  Some animals, finally, return to the sea for good. It happens gradually. They let their hearts lead them. Lonely and Sky are both whales, and it is the first time they’ve seen each other in a hundred and fifty lifetimes. Sky still has at least one set of feet, and is afraid to let go. We can’t breathe underwater, he says. It’s okay, says Lonely. Our chests are huge now—we can carry the sky down with us. We have lost our fur, we have lost our thin bony running, we have lost our greedy nocturnal eyes. Now we live by song. Can’t you hear it? He can. The song of the sea, which no one in the world will ever be able to put into words—now it issues forth to him, from the great lungs of his beloved. The sea sighs. Sky remembers, and goes in.

  Back on the land, the earth is drying up in places. Forests are opening, so that large animals can lumber peacefully between the trees. Bears and beavers, elephants and horses, and the first dogs. Some form clans. Some climb trees.

  Sky is the first monkey and Lonely is the tree he lives in with his family. He travels between many trees, never touching the ground, but she is the tree where he makes his nest. She is everything to him. She is his home, his food, his protection, his bed, his freedom. It is for her that his people have developed hands that grip, with thumbs that hook around the opposite way. It is for her that they have gotten so smart, so coordinated, their vision so deep and clever to judge the distances they must jump between the branches. It is to live in this height that they birth babies who cling to them, and it is to live among this complex canopy that they have developed a language of many tones and variations, and it is by being held in the joy of these arms that they have created community, and love, and family.

  But one day his people will come down from the trees, and forget the trees, and destroy them.

  Now the earth has a rhythm of seasons. It isn’t always warm, nor always wet, nor always dry. Ice forms. Cold sweeps through channels of ocean and whips up the winds. Entire forests fall away where the rains stop falling between mountains. The first meadows, the first grasslands, the first deserts—gradually the earth is moving, in its old age, toward spirit. Opening to the sky.

  Now animals who lurked in the forest, glimpsing other faces only a few times in a lifetime, can see each other for the first time. When Sky and Lonely, two deer, see each other, they are amazed. And it isn’t only the two of them. How many of them there are! They come together; they run in a great wind of many; they flow together like an ocean over the plains.

  Everything is mixing up. Anything can happen now. Mammals take to the sea; birds take to the land; primates come down from the trees, because they want to stand tall and reach for the sky on their own.

  Sky and Lonely are brother and sister. Sometimes they walk on four legs, and sometimes on two. They prefer to walk on two, because it makes them feel bigger, but it’s easier to walk on four. Their toes can still curl around the tree limbs, like their fingers.

  They swing down from the tree on the full moon, while their parents are sleeping. They stalk through the grass on two legs, pretending they are huge, laughing and waving their arms around. Now that their arms are free, they can do anything with them. They can walk on the air. They can make shapes with their hands. Sky grabs Lonely’s fur as she walks ahead of him. She whips around and grabs him around his waist. They fall on the ground, whooping in wonder and joy and terror. She tries to stand, and Sky pushes her back clumsily with the side of his arm because he sees a pack of hyenas snarling at them: they’ve come too close to their kill. But Lonely says No, I’m big! She stands and waves her arms like they were doing before. And Sky, not to be shown up by his sister, does the same. It’s
working! The hyenas back down.

  Afterwards they stand in amazement. They are the most powerful creatures in the world, because they can be anything they want to be. I’m a hyena now, Sky laughs, and crawls to the abandoned carcass, and takes a sip of blood. They have never eaten meat before. But they can do whatever they want to now.

  So they learn that to be human is to pretend, to become, to change. To be human is to shapeshift.

  Human beings live everywhere now, and now there is no other history but theirs. Everywhere they go, they create the world. Where the world does not suit them, they change it, or they change their ways to survive. They make tools. They make homes.

  One day Sky, a hunter, gets lost on his way back to camp. He sees a woman who looks like him, only more beautiful than anyone he has ever seen. She is slim and tiny, her forehead slopes low like an animal’s, and her hands curve like long paws. She says to him, This is the last you will see of my people. We are going under the earth now, where we will live only in myth. Then she drops to all fours and runs into a burrow.

  Sky walks on, a member of the only human species that will survive, and he notices for the first time that his people no longer know how to walk on all fours, even if they tried. How lonely it is, with his heart no longer facing the earth but shining all by itself into the air! He begins to run, because he remembers the way home now, and he wants to wrap his arms around his woman, Lonely, and press his heart to hers, because now they are each other’s only earth.

  But when he gets home, he sees her kneeling on the ground, digging in the earth for roots. He throws down his kill, and sees how different they are. He does not know how to approach her. He does not know what to say to her. His own frustration makes him hate her: the way she moves so gracefully, so quietly over her work, and the way the earth seems to know her still, the way it yields up its fruits to her hands.