Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Hope, longing, glee, fear—these were things we had all felt, but one did not show them so unselfconsciously, like an animal! One did not fling them out so desperately where anyone could see, like a weak animal that stands out from the herd for the predator’s watchful eye. We told ourselves we had never looked like that, and we felt that something awful would see us if we ever did. We kept our dignity and turned away from these newcomers.

  They were called the Mad Ones. We would not yet admit that we remembered them.

  But it was rumored, in terrified whispers, that they were searching for certain people. They would stop at the encampments in the meadows or by the river, and ask for people by name. They were led by someone whose face remained hidden beneath the hood of a dark cloak, and it was said that this leader was Death itself.

  But what was not known then, and not until much later, was that the mad people were searching for their families. And many of their families were found. And because everyone had lost so much, and had grieved the death of so many loved ones, no one was any longer in a position to deny a long-lost relative, lover, or friend, because he or she smelled badly or did not speak as people once had spoken. None of that mattered now. What those families realized then, before the rest of us did, was that we were all mad—and we all had those desperate looks in our faces. And they accepted their loved ones back among them.

  The leader of those mad people did not show herself at first. Perhaps she did not want to startle us. She remained inside her dark cloak, and she gathered some of us—the families of these Mad Ones, who had been given new hope now, and who had rediscovered some of the goodness and humanity in themselves by accepting the Mad Ones into their arms again—to the First Council.

  There were not many. Only a small crowd gathered on that grey day—what we would later know as the first day of Spring—in a hidden pocket of the rubble where the City Center had once stood. Stronger than any other building in the City, it had stood for longer than the rest, and no one knew what material made it. But something in that material was weakened drastically by the salt water of the sea, and after the sea came it had begun to sink, until its supports collapsed, and piece by piece it fell.

  Nothing grew there, in that dusty, crumbled place. The woman in the cloak gathered us there that day, and she did not give wisdom, advice, hope, or answers. She simply told us a story that she would tell over and over throughout the following moons, at every Council that was held thereafter. And those of us there that day were so hungry for a story, so hungry for anything to make our minds wonder again and our hearts rise up in curiosity, so hungry for words with meaning, that we listened. She did not tell the story of the City or what had come before. We weren’t ready for that yet. Instead, she told the story of herself.

  She told how she’d lived trapped all alone in a tower for more years than she knew, and about the faraway winds and seas that swirled around that forgotten place. She told how the only person who loved her had left her and never come back, and how she had come down from the tower and been sent out alone across the sea. She told of her long, long journey, the beautiful places she had come through, and how she had longed to reach the heart of that one who would love her and whom she could love. She told of finding him and losing him again, of getting lost in the great pointless cycle of time, and of becoming the wind. She told the great myth of Loneliness.

  Her voice was child-like and light, but it comforted us the way the sound of the rain comforted us when we first heard it fall on the pavement. We who were ready to believe anything, who were ready for any kind of magic—even magic we had never heard of—cried when we heard her story. We cried because we knew what that felt like, to be trapped all alone in an empty abyss in a tower of our own illusions, not to know why we were there or how long we had been there, and not to know if we could ever be loved. We knew what it felt like to travel all alone and to long for something or someone like that. We knew all about Loneliness. When we cried, we began to feel a little more human again for the first time. And the great miracle was that after telling her story, this woman asked us to tell ours.

  All that day we told our stories! She made a space somehow there, so that we could. We told stories we never thought we would tell. We told how we had killed the people we found inside this very building, when we found they had no answers and nothing for us. We told about the loved ones we had not been able to save, or whom we had been too selfish to save. We told about the dark parts of ourselves, and we told of the shape that Loneliness took for each one of us. For some it had happened when alone all day in a house with nothing but machines to talk to, and for others it happened when standing in a crowd that was forever pushing onward and past us. For some it had happened most before the City was destroyed, when we sat at our desks at our jobs, and for others it happened afterward, when everyone we knew was gone and we walked like ghosts in a wasteland we did not recognize and could never get out of. She made it so that every one of us got a chance to speak, even if we thought we could never speak, even if we thought we could never be heard.

  When that was done, there was, for some of us, a feeling of great relief, but for others there was a feeling of such weight and despair that we could not go on. How could you bring this out of us? we cried. Before, we were at least able to survive in this terrible world, day to day just focusing on living, not thinking of the horrors we suffered or committed. But now you have made us remember all this, admit to it, and speak of it. How will we live with this now?

  And she listened to our despair, and she spoke the names of our feelings, so that we could meet them face to face for the first time. She introduced them to us. Grief. Fury. Horror. Numbness.

  She said to us, “You do not have to hold all of this alone. It is part of the World. It is part of everything.”

  Then she took us to the river, and she let us listen to its song. She called the river Yora, and she told us that, because the goddess of this river had returned to it, we could once again understand its language. We found that she was right. It was not so much a language of words, not a language we could write here. But it was a language that listened, that already knew all of our stories. It was a song language, something we could sing to our children.

  She took us to the meadows and bade us listen to the wind. She took us to the earth and showed us what plants would make our bodies feel better. She lit a fire as the night came on, gathered us around it, and told us to look into its center. All of that took a long time, and we cannot put into words now what happened to us during that time. But as we sat around the fire that evening, we felt a little better. It felt as if the world, instead of fighting us as we had always believed, was actually cradling us in its hands. As if it could absorb and understand everything we felt, because it was made of the same stuff we were. We hadn’t any idea of that before. We hadn’t any idea that we were loved.

  And that day, though many people did not even know of it yet, was the day the City was reborn.

  This woman was spoken of differently then. The people who had been at the Council spoke of her to others, and others came when she held the next Council. She traveled around the City, and many people wanted to see her. We wanted to hear the story she told. We wanted to tell our own stories. As the Councils grew larger and larger, not all were able to tell their story to her. But once she had begun the story-telling, we everywhere began to emerge from our state of shock, and we began to tell each other stories, even when she wasn’t there. We began to gather for story-telling at places where our stories would be reflected back to us by the mirrors of the world: by the river, under the open sky, or around a fire.

  Gradually, like a bubble rising to the surface, the truth of the Princess’ identity was becoming clear to us. At first that identity had never occurred to us. The old myths of the Princess were even less remembered than the myths of Hanum, and, besides, in the old days we had never imagined the Princess like this. We had never i
magined her in a dark cloak with such a laughing voice, such ease in speaking with us, and such suffering in her story. Or perhaps we had never imagined relating to her at all. We had never thought of such a thing. Long ago boys had spoken of rescuing her. No one had ever imagined that she would come to us.

  But once the idea was spoken aloud—the idea that she was here—then that bubble burst, and all of the sudden everyone knew it and everyone spoke it. Word traveled instantaneously, faster than cars had ever traveled. The Princess was here. The Princess had come to lead us, to save us.

  Whether it happened before or after this realization, we cannot say now, but the Princess cast off her cloak more and more often, and when she came among us, she allowed her beauty to shine. It was dazzling. Birds often flew near her, as if simply to bathe in that beauty. Each curve of her face was as delicately shaped as the edges of a fine grain of sand. Her body flowed forth through the rainbow dreamscape of her dress. Her hands lay open against the air, and windows of light opened around her. The more she admitted to and revealed her beauty, the more magic seemed to follow in her wake. Green grass exploded through the pavement around her feet. Polluted skies melted into clear blue above her.

  For a little while we remembered the sacredness of beauty for the sake of beauty alone. For a little while that beauty fed and inspired us, and we remembered that beauty is the only thing that saves us from the dismal realities of life. But soon it became clear why she had hidden herself from us before. For we were still starving and homeless, and we did not know how to rebuild our lives or be happy. It was hard for us to see such beauty and not expect something of it for ourselves. Now that she had come to us and proven herself magical, we expected her to save us or at least to give us answers.

  We men felt a furious hunger when we saw her. We felt our ugliness and stench in the filth we lived in. We felt our weakness, when we saw her power—and we resented it. We women felt the raw burning of every loss we’d ever been dealt, the breathless cold in our chests where our youth had once lived, and the trembling fury of all the passions we’d held back all those years—and we resented her, and did not trust her. Our children looked at her long soft dress and felt its untouchable distance; they thought of all the things they no longer had and which they had learned not even to ask for.

  There was no place for such beauty, such abundance of life as flowed from her, in this bitter wasteland that our lives had become. Or so we began to feel, watching her. We will not try to say who started it or to find who hurled the first angry words, but at one great Council that she held by the river, the darkness finally rose out of us.

  It began with angry questions and then angry demands. Would she not help us? What good were stories? Where did she come from, and if she wasn’t one of us, then who was she? What did she know of our suffering? Then we were coming toward her, and a bony hand reached out like claws and tore at her dress. Then as if that hand had given permission, other hands rose up around it, clawing and pulling. If the Princess cried out, we could not hear. We were no longer ourselves. We just wanted so much to touch her, and we wanted so much to have what she had.

  That was when the Prince appeared.

  There was no clear record of him before this. Some claimed later that they had seen him all along, but that before this he had been like a ghost that followed her, never speaking and not in solid form. Most of us did not remember ever seeing him before, and yet since we had always seen her in a crowd, we could not be sure that she had always been alone. If he was present to us before, he had not become truly real until this moment.

  But suddenly he was real, and his sword made a circle around her, so that everyone stepped back, though no one was hurt. This giant crowd of people went absolutely silent. This man of shadowy golden skin, as fluid and graceful as the wind, as beautiful as the Princess herself, stood tensely before her, his legs braced against the ground, and continued to hold out his sword. Even those of us at the back of the crowd who could barely see his face could see the flashing in his eyes. He was tall and bird-like, and yet his muscles and his gaze held as much determination as ours did.

  “What do you fight for?” he cried out, so that all of us could hear. “If you are going to fight me, you’d better know what you are fighting for. Because what you fight for makes you what you are, and you will have to live with that forever.”

  When we still remained silent, he added, “And you have to know who and what you are fighting.”

  When we didn’t move, he dropped his sword, and then he stood there beside her, and they were so beautiful together that all we could do was look. Our hearts ached. He spoke to us that day, more than he would ever speak to us thereafter except at the very last Council, the last time we ever saw him. But he did not say many things. He asked us only a few simple questions, about who we wanted to be. He asked us if we wanted anything more than just to survive, and if there was anything we valued more than our lives. He asked us how we wanted to remember these days, and how we wanted our children to remember us.

  Then he told us that this was the beginning of our story, and that any people who becomes truly human, in the most holy sense of the word, must begin with a story. He told us that we must find our story and tell it, and that in every moment of our lives we must live the stories we believe in. He told us there is a sacred order to things and a way that things must be done.

  At every Council after, of which there were still many more held that Summer, both the Prince and the Princess were present. There was no more anger and rebellion toward the Princess, though the Prince had never actually fought anyone, and no one actually feared that he would. They simply respected him and her. Though we could not explain it to ourselves, we trusted the Princess more now, now that we knew she wasn’t acting alone. The power she brought felt more balanced, somehow, in that two-ness.

  At every Council, the Prince first saw that things were in order. First he spoke with the elements and with the animals and plants that were present. It took us a long time to see that this is what he did, for he would walk silently around us and face outward, and we would see saplings or weeds that grew from the pavement trembling in the breeze as they faced him, and we would see small rodents move before him and then seem to freeze as if attending, and we would see the birds land on the rooftops and listen. Sometimes he made soft sounds or seemed to sing, but he did not speak to us or tell us what he was doing. He never taught us anything in words. But simply by watching him, we began to notice how the life around us spoke and listened. We began to see the beauty of the things around us, and as we sat in that silence we began to imagine the new world we might create, a City that would reflect such beauty.

  We were a little in awe of him, a little afraid. The winds seemed to murmur in response to his voice. Then he would go around the crowd, whisper to the children, and look into each person’s eyes—not in a stern or commanding way, but in a way that made us shiver, a way that forced us to remember the promises we’d made to ourselves about who we really wanted to be. It was as if he knew that about us, as if he’d seen our dreams.

  So the Prince made and kept the order of things, while the Princess spoke and listened to us. They did not actually lead. They only allowed us to speak, so that we could begin to think about how we would rebuild, what we would build, and who would do it. They helped us find elders who remembered the skills we’d forgotten, people who had secretly grown gardens and knew what food was; these people had been hiding until now, afraid the others would find them and steal everything they had. The Princess asked the elders of different peoples among us, people of different colors who came from different landscapes long ago, what they could remember. And gradually, gently, as if afraid to hurt us, the Princess told the story of Hanum and how the City was born. But we felt, by now, as if we already knew that story. We found that we remembered more than we had ever admitted to.

  This was a time of miracles, and that is why we chroni
cle the coming of the Princess and the Prince as our Creation Story. But the miracles were not performed directly by them. The miracles happened within us, in their presence. We became good again. We began to help each other. We began to look to each other for answers, for there are many, many people in this place, and we have had many experiences, and we have learned wisdom of untold variety from our families, our schools, our jobs, and our lives, and together we have unimaginable intelligence. So we began to respect ourselves again.

  This magical couple, whom we now call gods, never gave us answers. But the Prince was like a firm hand that held us steady, and the Princess was like a mirror of water that the hand held up for us to see ourselves within. In that mirror, finally—because she saw it—we saw our own beauty. We remembered our dreams. Perhaps she was shy at first, but over time that shyness seemed to melt away, and sometimes, instead of standing before us, she would walk quietly among us, touch us, and let us touch her. When we saw her up close, we saw that she was only a person like us, smiling and a little awkward, her lips parted often in surprise and question, laughing easily in the presence of children. Though the Prince never spoke to us individually, and remained always a little distant, communing with forces we could not see, we could feel his kindness and also his love for her. And though later no one could agree on exactly what either of them looked like—their exact features or even the exact shade of their skin —we began to feel that we knew them intimately.

  The Princess spoke of how grateful she was, finally, to be one of us. She told of how when she’d first come into the City, she had never seen so many people in her whole life. How, when she saw us for the first time, she wept with joy to know that there were so many faces on this earth, so many possibilities—and with sorrow to know that her father, in all his brilliance and magic, had somehow never seen the potential that we ourselves held within us.