by Mandi Lynn
“Anna is okay,” I tell him, though I know nothing of the fact.
The man seems to find comfort in my voice, and I let him embrace that. His thoughts continue to stream, but they are whispers now, a constant background to his reality. His heart rate calms until it comes to a steady beat again.
I love you, Anna.
Memories flash through his mind again, this time slower. I see her, much younger. Her hands interlocked with this man whose name I don’t even know. I share the memory of their first kiss, how nervous and thrilling it all felt. But the last, most distinct memory is Anna in bed, barely able to lift her hand. The man wraps her in his arms and carries her outside. A young man works in the field—their son. They watch him. The man holds her, kisses her forehead, and Anna cries, but it is unknown if the tears are of happiness or sadness.
He continues to remember, happier somehow, just knowing her. The moment seems so private that I want to pull away. As beautiful as it feels to experience life again, I also feel a need to leave. The wind pushes against his skin, carrying a chill as I leave his body.
And just like that, there is no such thing as cold or warmth or touch.
LXI.
The forest is a flood of color and shapes as I pass. Beneath my feet gravel and soil give way to my steps, but some moments I feel as if I’m trapped in quicksand that threatens to take me under. Branches of leaves overhang my head, but the world glows in colors of orange and pink. I can’t see the sun, but I know it’s passing. It’s the last moments of day, when the world is more alive than anything.
I push and shove away branches as the sun shrinks, telling me my free time is almost up. I can feel an urgency in my spine that travels to my chest. Breathing is hard. My lungs gasp for air, but no relief comes of it—there is never enough air. I have no stone to clutch like the others. I’m bound to Phantom Lagoon just like all them, even if no stone possesses my soul.
My pace slows the farther I go, and the lagoon is so close. I can see the trees that have created a solid fence, but I’m dragging myself. I can feel a scream about to erupt in my core, begging to be released, to be heard, but I don’t allow it.
I try too hard to look toward the lagoon, but I want to curl in on myself and forget. The lagoon calls to me in a possessive way, and no matter how badly I want to follow that call, I can’t do it.
The trees are only a few strides away when I stop completely, feeling crushed. I gasp for breath, but it only results in wheezing. Pressure pushes into me from every direction as it chokes my lungs.
“Luna!” someone screams out, so close.
I turn my head and see Hadley. Her face peeks out between the branches, but she keeps her distance. The sky is growing dark, pushing in on me, and I think this might be it. After all these years, I’ve faced the end of my life. My story ends here. It only seems fair after living for so long.
I don’t believe I’ll go to Heaven, Hell, or any place like that. I can feel it as if I’m being pulled from the world, that I’ll simply cease to exist. Maybe that’s what happens when an Essence lives so long on Earth. I’ve already had my afterlife.
I want to tell Hadley to leave, to let me pass, but she doesn’t. Behind the confines of our barrier she tries to find some way to help me, but it’s hopeless. I’m here. She’s there.
All at once Hadley stands her ground. “What about Garren?” she shouts to me. “What if he comes to find you and you’re gone? What am I supposed to tell him?”
Through all the pain I’m able to hear her, but I don’t want to listen to the words. My Essence is leaving me. Why can’t she understand this?
“You’re not a coward, Luna,” Hadley says, but her voice is off—if she were human, she would be crying. “Please, fight. We need you.”
I’m an Essence. There is no sense of touch in my world, yet at this moment, I feel what humans must feel before death. It’s not the light at the end of the tunnel that glorifies and lifts; it’s the robber that slams you in the back and corners you into a tunnel. I have given up, but I look at Hadley and I feel the fight come.
“Garren loves you. You know he does,” she tells me.
I want to speak, to tell Hadley that she is wrong, that Garren couldn’t have possibly loved me, but hope lives within me. What if he does love me?
I fall against one of the trees, my body nothing but an Essence without purpose. Hadley watches me as I fall to the ground. She smiles once I start walking toward her, but as soon as I trip, her face falls.
The world is taking my soul back. The weight becomes so much, and then, all at once, it is gone. My soul is floating from the forest with the pain—the memories. Nothing becomes everything. Black becomes color. Death becomes life. Dust turns to solid ground.
And there is Garren, waiting for me. Hidden in the trees, he was always here. His face is as kind and genuine as I had remembered, and I hear a whisper.
“I love you, Aida. I’m searching for you.”
I no longer have my human body or form, but there are tears. I don’t know how they’re here, but I am crying. I am an Essence and I’m crying.
I don’t want to leave.
BOOK 4
LXII.
It was all yellow. It was soft and kind and I didn’t ever want to leave, but I was gone all the same. There were moments in time where nothing existed, and times nothing was everything. It didn’t make sense, because it didn’t need to.
But it was yellow, and I saw my soul, and it was beautiful.
~~~
She’s dancing. I don’t recognize her at first, but then the face reveals her to be Brielle. She looks younger, closer to my age—something closer to twenty years old. She’s alone in her dance, but it makes her happy. Everything is so bright that it takes longer for me to see the other woman with her. She’s also happy, but she doesn’t dance. Instead she laughs. It’s her sister; her hair is lighter. It isn’t gray like it had been the last time I had seen her, but her winkles and sunken skin have also disappeared.
Without thinking too much about it I know they are dead, passed on. Even Brielle, without coming back to the lagoon, has moved on with her sister. And moving on is something that is so beautifully okay.
~~~
I’m anchored in place. Not in a suffocating way, but in the way that, no matter how hard I may try to tug or pull, there’s no real use in the effort. So I don’t struggle. I let myself sink and propel in something deeper that I don’t completely understand. Colors and shapes shift over my vision in a display of sight and movement. I feel tempted to reach out and touch the array, but I have no desire to lift my limbs. So I float on.
I’m not in Heaven. There are peeks and small sights, but it’s nothing more than a preview. I see my mother and father. I see Margo with Joelle, and they’re happy. I don’t know where Anton is, but they don’t look for him. Dondre is there, older than I had ever remembered him, and he’s with a woman he holds close. She loves him—that much is clear.
There are no clear images. Faces blur together and morph into memories and moments in time that I wasn’t there to witness. In the reflection of Dondre’s eyes I see the day he married, though I don’t know the name of his bride. My mother and father are younger, happier, blissfully unaware I’m missing from their Heaven. But in a way they each hold their own Heaven. They exist together, yet separate. Mama kisses Papa and he smiles back at her. In their eyes I see my face, when I was just an infant. I see the fear Papa felt toward me when he looked into my silver-white eyes and didn’t know what to do. But the fear is just a vague memory now and nothing more.
I see Garren, but he’s not as clear as my family. He seems so dull in comparison, but something so very alive, so very different from my family. I see his soul glowing a deep red, almost as if he had his own stone from the lagoon, and I know he is not here with my family. He is elsewhere, without me, still wandering, searching. And there is love in his heart.
Joelle sings without words. She runs and jumps, and Margo watches he
r, as vibrant colors of life and ease radiate off her soul.
It seems like such a tease to see them in Heaven without me, but I don’t feel jealousy. I’ve achieved bliss in my own way, my own Heaven, though I am so completely separate. And I know I’m nothing. Not alive or dead, not a human or an Essence. I’m floating and yet I’m anchored. I’m something and yet I’m nothing. My soul left the world in a whisper, and it’s being pulled down to Earth again, screaming.
~~~
There’s no light when I awake. I lie across the ground with a rock wall that towers over my head, cocooning around me. The closer I see, the more clarity I am granted. The walls are embedded with stones of crystal. Around me familiar bodies come into form—I’m inside the cave, the one by the lagoon.
Emily and Melissa are seated next to each other, leaning against the wall. Brielle lies across the floor, her long legs curled in. Conor sits with his head resting against the wall. Jackson is slumped over to the side with Theo lying nearby. Giles is curled in on himself, propped against a rock. Hadley has her hands folded in, her gown pooling out around her like a blanket. Clara is separate from the others, only an infant. She’s in a small ball, hidden away in a corner. They all sleep in peace, bodies without an Essence.
Light enters the cave as ray upon ray of sunshine echoes off each of the crystal-embedded walls. It gives the cave light but also puts emphasis upon the stillness of so many familiar faces.
“Luna?” someone says, a few seconds later. “Oh, my God, you’re awake.”
I lift my head to see Hadley. She’s exactly as I had remembered. Her hair still sits in beautiful curls atop her head, dressed beautifully for Valen. She’s the same. I’m not gone. I’m here and Hadley’s not in Heaven. I’m not in Heaven.
Hadley rushes toward me, putting out her hand as I kneel to the ground. She comes beside me and wraps her arms around my shoulders.
“You’re back,” she says, and her voice breaks in uneven breaths that tell me she wants to cry the dry tears of an Essence.
“I was gone,” I say. My breath shudders like I had just been resuscitated. All at once the world is being handed back to me.
She pulls away to look at me, and the smile across her face is larger than any I have ever seen. “The sun went down, and you weren’t here. You were gone, but I gave you a stone once you finally made it back. You never woke, but the stone changed color, like it has for every human who enters the lagoon. Giles carried you to the cave.”
For the first time I see the stone wrapped in my fingers. The color is a deep pink, richer than that of a sunset, and it looks almost like the color of Garren’s soul. The surface is smooth like glass except for a side that is scarred and jagged.
“It split in half when I gave it to you. The other half crumbled once it fell from your hand,” she tells me. Her voice pauses as she looks at the stone in my hand. “It used to be yellow.”
My soul isn’t the glowing yellow I had seen outside Heaven. Without knowing how, I’m an Essence once again.
“Where were you?” Hadley asks me. Her voice is sad and I want to tell her what I’ve seen, but I don’t feel I can. The things I have seen aren’t meant for those on Earth; and I don’t know why I’m here any longer, but I can’t tell her all the truth.
“Elsewhere,” I say instead.
She looks at me, waiting for more, but I don’t offer it. After a few more breaths she’s able to nod her head and let it go. “Okay,” she says.
“Where’s Brielle?” I ask.
Hadley looks at me, unable to speak. I wait for her to answer, but she never does. Finally she just closes her eyes, as she shakes her head.
She’s gone. I saw Brielle—she had moved on. Heaven welcomed her soul with open arms and embraced her while it left me on the outside, watching, but unable to take part.
“She never came back after dark,” I say.
Hadley nods her head.
I want to tell her that I saw Brielle, that she’s safe and at peace, but there are so many things I can’t explain, so many things I feel I shouldn’t explain.
“Have any other humans found Phantom Lagoon?” I ask.
This time Hadley smiles with innocent eyes. “Yes, but it’s beautiful, Luna. We’re something more than just lost souls—we’re family. Some of us have powers, like my father and me. We can be seen, heard, or touched—some can even have more than one power. I don’t understand why, but it’s possible to hold on to something of the human world. And it’s beautiful to witness.”
“Are there others who fail to come back after dark?”
Hadley’s smile is short-lived. It dies off once the question comes from my lips. “Sometimes, yes. I’ve tried very hard to explain to them why they can’t do that, but something always calls them back to their human life.”
There’s hope in her words that she isn’t aware of. The human life and that calling might be what brought Brielle to Heaven, and I can only hope the other Essences—the ones I haven’t met—that they might have found Heaven also.
I can see Hadley is confused as to why I don’t mourn the loss of an Essence and their spirit, but that is something she will never see. They’ve moved on. And I want to tell each and every Essence how to move on to Heaven, but telling such a thing isn’t possible. It’s like an Essence must be drawn by his or her own love to their human life, like Brielle had—anything other than love will end in the withdrawal from Heaven—able to observe but nothing more.
I look at Hadley, wondering how it is she brought me back to this world.
LXIII.
I step through the cave until I meet the foliage that covers the entrance. The leaves as vines give way, and the world is open to me once again. No light shines into the cave. The sky is dark except for the moon that hovers over us in a sharp crescent. Hadley lets me step out first, following close behind. She doesn’t introduce me to the new faces, as we step out.
Many are asleep in the night. People gather into groups of friends, crowding around each other as they fall into the human habit we called sleep. A group of women is near the lagoon—Melissa and Emily are with them—and another smaller group of men, still awake, sit scattered around the large rocks on the ground. They stop speaking when the vines fall back into place behind Hadley. Theo, Jackson, and Conor are in one of the groups. At the sight of me they raise their eyebrows—surprised, but not entirely taken off guard. Conor seems confused as he looks me over, but once he is able to determine that it is really me, he gives a small wave.
Farther off I see Gravis asleep against a large stone. Giles is sitting at the edge of the water with a woman. Both their backs are to me, but like the men Conor is with, he hears my approach and turns. The woman Giles sits next to looks at me, but her face is unfamiliar. Giles smiles when he sees me and turns back to the woman, whispering something. At his words she smiles before turning to face the water again. Giles nods his head in what seems like approval as I exit the cave and enter this lagoon I have found.
The night is alive. More unknown people have come to this place, but peace is in the air. Some sleep and some whisper in small conversations. There’s harmony to it all.
“Look,” Hadley whispers.
I follow her gaze and see the trees we have planted. They have grown wider in the time I’ve been away, creating a barrier for any humans who may wander in. But most prominent are the branches that reach above our heads. Leaves cloak the edges of the lagoon and overcast the water. An eerie, almost magical aura fills the air.
“It’s magnificent,” I say.
Hadley smiles next to me and takes me by the arm. She leads me to the highest point in the lagoon—the path that winds to meet the top of the cave. She doesn’t follow me; instead she pushes me forward and walks away. I gaze over the sleeping and quiet bodies below, most of whom I don’t recognize.
I see the faces of people I thought had disappeared long ago—personal ghosts of my world. I see Cyrielle and Jermaine cradling little baby Nouvel. I see Mama and P
apa, Dondre—the spitting image of Papa. Margo plays with Joelle, and, by the movement of her lips, I know she’s singing to her daughter—and if I listen close enough, I can hear the whispered song through the trees. Sabine holds Clara in her arms, smiling and rocking her child in a slow, continuous rhythm. Clara sleeps soundly, peacefully in the way only an infant can find repose.
Heaven dances in front of my eyes in a disarray between life and death. Mama and Papa smile up at me, but they don’t speak. They are whispers, ghosts, reminders of what is beyond my reach. As much as I want to be with them, I don’t feel bound to them. I feel myself in this earth. I’m the soil beneath my feet and the leaves in the trees. I’m within each Essence that rests in the night below. And I see that this—life, death, and spirit—this is what love looks like.
My family fades before my eyes, leaving me with a blissful goodbye to the night of reality. Once again I’m left with those I’ve never met and those that I wish to know. Hadley has found her place with the group of women, finding a spot to sleep. It only takes her body a few moments to find peace and lull away.
She is the only one who knows my story. She’s the only one who’s heard of my waiting soul. She knows I wasn’t in love with a human, but an Essence who is still out there somewhere. Garren is a secret I don’t want to share. And I look at Hadley and hope she can somehow understand why it is I’ve lied to her in this night. Why I haven’t told her what is outside Phantom Lagoon in hopes she will find it herself.
LXIV.
Another day closes, but not all faces are present. The familiar and unknown souls of the lagoon swarm within the confines of the trees. Someone is missing. I scan within the groups—Conor, Emily, Melissa, Gravis, Jackson, Theo, Giles. They’re all here, including those I only know by their faces, yet to determine their names. I try to place Hadley, but she isn’t anywhere in sight—neither is her father.
“Giles,” I shout above the group.
