The Heart of Everything by Nanette Littlestone

Author:Nanette Littlestone [Littlestone, Nanette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781736464083
Publisher: Indie Author Project
Published: 2021-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

I

am not a savior. My heart kicks as if to prove that point.

Now is the time I would escape to the forest and pound out my worries over miles of packed dirt and Ponderosa pine. The sun, the fresh air, the shaded canopies would fill my body with release and my anxieties would melt away just as the icicles do in the spring. But there’s no forest here, no sun or fresh air, so I do the next best thing. I take to the paths.

People scatter in alarm as I race by, their bodies pressed against the walls, their mouths and eyes wide in shock. Distrust. “You don’t belong here,” someone calls out. But I don’t care. I’m trying to fit in. I’m doing my best. But how can I be a model citizen when I don’t understand this place?

I’ve run from red to yellow and I’m coming up on orange, the place of Ceremony. The path is quiet now and I’m tempted to stop and seek its sanctuary, but I need to calm my jitters. To push myself until my body cries out from exhaustion. Maybe then I’ll be able to make sense of what just happened.

I don’t know what I expected Tirtzah to say. Most people have no clue about their purpose in the world. But I know. I’ve known since I was a kid, since Philip took me to the planetarium and introduced me to the wonderful world of the Milky Way Galaxy. It wasn’t simply Philip’s passion for astronomy that steered my course. Stars are in my blood. Perhaps my parents named me Rigel because I was already a star child, not because they wanted to push me in that direction. The direction had been defined and they were merely following the dictates of the path. But just because I know what I want to do doesn’t mean I’m someone’s salvation. Or, in this case, a whole lot of someones.

Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed all signed up for their missions. They willingly and purposefully dedicated themselves to a path of righteousness and purity. I’m an atheist. An agnostic, at best.

They’ve got the wrong girl.

I leave orange and merge with green. The layout of the community seems simple now. I can chart the color wheel in my head. If I had “exercised” my need to exercise earlier, I would have figured out the flow without all the headache of getting lost.

Nourishers leave the kitchen with heaping bowls and platters of food and I have to do some fancy footwork to avoid plowing into them. I wave at the astonished look on Shoshana’s face and continue on my way. My body needs the food but my emotions claw at each other.

How I wish there were some hills or sharp turns or low-cropping boulders to climb, something different to shake me out of this worry. But the path continues on, eventually passing by blue and then indigo and then back to red where I don’t even hesitate. I start on round two.

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