Lonely in the Heart of the World by Mindi Meltz

Author:Mindi Meltz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Logosophia Books
Published: 2014-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

She wakes once during the night. She sees the humanness in his collapsed form, as if his bones became soft; she feels his surrendered weight against her and sees his eyelashes long against his face, flickering with the torment of consciousness lost beneath them. She cradles him against her. She strokes his back, that part of him he cannot see. I will stay awake for you, she thinks. You who have stayed awake for a hundred years—I will keep the flame burning tonight, so that you, finally, can rest. Rest inside me. Let go, finally, beloved.

Then she looks up at the stars: the night sky that knew her before anyone knew her, when she first saw through the image of herself into the universe.

She watches that sky for a long time, and she knows that sky, and that sky knows her. She feels the wind touch her cheek—very slightly, just barely, only a whisper in the stillness—and that wind knows her name.

In the unconscious clinging of Sky’s sleeping body, her own body dreams, and her mind tiptoes off into memories of long yellow fields that stretched unhindered from dawn to dusk. The infinity of the sea behind her; the promise of the world before her. The beat of the horse’s rhythm against the humming earth. The sun melting into tomorrow. The sight of the desert from the high cliffs, and the things the wind told her, as if she were its secret and only friend.

Standing on the edge of the cliff overlooking the desert, she was dizzy with the fear of falling, but even then she’d known that what she truly feared was her own desire to fly.

All those days riding her horse through the meadows, walking upon desert, climbing the hills, pressing through forests—all those days she’d ached with such a pain of longing, yet those days had been hers alone. They had belonged to her and to no one else. Even her longing had been pure somehow: somehow whole in itself, somehow holy.

What if just as Sky fears his own need, she fears equally her own longing for freedom?

Because she now finally holds in her arms the man she so longed for, she allows herself for one instant—an instant she will forget later—to ask herself this question. She wonders what her life could have been like without this destiny laid upon her. She remembers what Rye asked her out in the simple, peaceful fields, when she held fresh soil in her hands: What would you do, if you didn’t have to go to that mountain?

It isn’t a painful question, or a question that must now be answered. It is only a question, as passing as the breeze.

The dead cold night chills the water tight against her skin. “Sky,” she murmurs gently, and tries to roll them together out of the water onto dry land. He murmurs back, grasps after her with his arms as she shuffles awkwardly onto the ground without rising, scraping her hips on stone. He reaches for her, clutches at her and then relaxes again into sleep.

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