Don't Hang Your Soul on That by Robert Hilles

Author:Robert Hilles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guernica Editions

CHAPTER 8

Chum Phae Present day

MANY SWIRLS OF stars weave around the full moon tonight. Nan and Ed sit outside and he shifts his gaze to the night sky. It appears even more otherworldly and distant than it has other evenings, even the one after Sutum died. The stars are in flux as Nan and he are in flux, as everything is in flux.

He’s not sure why but thinks of gravity tonight and how it keeps the planets in place. It’s the only cosmic glue he knows of for certain, but Nan knows of others. She’s turned away from him and is meditating. He meditates now too.

They remain outside and talk and at one point she says that there’s an inner balance and an outer balance. The inner balance is our gyroscope and is what keeps us from spinning out of control.

He asks her what an outer balance is, and she says it’s the necessary balances in the physical world—like right balances left, hot balances cold, light balances dark, and good balances evil.

Clouds have formed overhead, blocking whole swaths of the night sky. He thinks then of how words ripple and ideas flow from one to the other. She doesn’t elaborate on this and instead tells him that Song wishes to visit Sutum tomorrow night. He will light incense and sit and chant with Sutum and then later the two will visit.

“He must do this alone,” she says.

The next evening, Ed prepares dinner. He cooks sticky rice, cabbage, chopped garlic, onions and eggplant. Nan naps as he lets the eggplant simmer in the frying pan in a thin layer of water. Standing over the single propane burner, he realizes that love comes in stages and in the middle of love it is possible to believe that love has always existed, that the beloved has always been the beloved. Love is more constant than most other emotions. Anger and fear are the most transitory, the most impulsive. They may come and go quickly, but love endures. Once love is declared it feels permanent. And thinking about his love for Nan, it is possible to believe he has always loved her exactly as he loves her now. Dealing with Sutum’s ghost has only intensified that love and allows him to sense for the first time that this love has carried forward for the both of them, that it is larger than this life.

He’s always thought of love as being confined to a single life but sees no reason why now. He accepts that any given life can have residues or latencies of past loves from past lives and those carry forward into this life and the next. The first time he met Nan he had felt different although then he hadn’t been equipped to think that way. But he does now and likes the idea of cascading love, and that love requires many attempts. He senses what they have now is deeper than what any one life can provide. In this moment he

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