First People
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I was in her head the same as she was in mine. It was easy. A connection. Vines and tendrils entwining around each other, rooting through our bodies and binding us together so we mirrored the landscape that surrounded us. Fertility and life all wrapped up with our skin.
They were new words to me then; us and we. I’d always been alone in the Before. Or the Before Before, I should say.
Because there were three stages.
In the Before Before there was just me, before I had met her, and before it had happened. And I thought I was happy and complete until the vines led me to her and I realized that I had for all that time been living as a half. So in the times when I was filled up with her, that was just the Before. And after that, we come to now. Horrible and destructive and inescapable Now.
The tendrils were only faint at first. But I felt them pulling, gentle, lightly. Like a breeze, the small hand of a dreaming child. I felt them creep into my head and whisper to me about the existence of her. They showed me what was on her inside. Her essence, I suppose. It’s difficult to describe, especially now, now that everything that was so up close and simple in my mind has been kind of, distanced. But it was like an explanation of everything about her, in just one glimpse of colour.
She is the impossibly pale blue on the cloudless skyline just before the sun sets.
I’m ochre, she tells me, like sea-swept sand.
I don’t know what He is. Maybe all of them, or nothing at all. The colour of the autumn leaves when they turn, pale green flesh fading around a plum stone. But now, when I look up at the sky at night, I think He is this colour.
Because of the trick the sky used to play on me every evening, pretending to me that it wraps up the whole world when it gets dark, all snug and close like in a box. So close that I used to think I could touch it. But now I know you can never touch the sky, that beyond the black there is more space than you could ever fit inside of your thoughts. And I think maybe He is the colour of the sky because beyond the black, which pretends to be solid (like water turning to ice) beyond this there is everything.
And inside of Him there is everything.
I haven’t seen much beyond the black, but I suspect its all there, all the colours, and everything I don’t know, and every small thing that I do. The bad things, and the good and the ugly and beautiful. And the truth. So really, when I think He is the colour of the night sky, just plain black, I know that actually He is the colour of everything there is. It is like behind the black of the sky is His mind. I came out of His mind, and every other thing came out of His mind, and as soon as we came out, every truth that we were too small and unthinking to find out got covered up with darkness. At night we see the dark and the silhouettes. And even in the day when the light wakes up the colours, he’s still hiding so much of it from us.
Except for that day, when for one moment he let me see just a tiny part of the truth.
And it hurt. It wasn’t enlightening or simple or blissful. It was clumsy and bruised. It was some non-sentient creature charging through the vines that connect me and her, and leaving them ripped and bleeding trails of sap as they drag along behind us. That was how the truth felt. That was the knowledge.
Things were simpler before the knowledge.
Back when we only had innocence.
I felt inside of me that someone was tiptoeing. Just there, in my thoughts, quite shy but burning with curiosity. Having a peer into my dreams, and rustling through old to-do lists. They tickled my brain and made me feel warm all over. When I was sleeping, that night, I didn’t feel alone though I knew I was. I mean, I’m never completely alone, because of the birds and the animals, but in another way, I was always alone, because I was one, just one of me, nobody else. That night I dreamt of vines pushing through my skin, and when I woke up in the morning, after I’d opened my eyes I couldn’t move, like my body hadn’t quite caught up, and for a moment I thought that the vines in my dream had re-rooted back into the ground, and I was part of it, grown in.
I shook the sleep off me then, and started walking through the forest, not sure where I was going, but knowing it was right. There were two parts of my knowing, it seemed, one was in the front of me, in my skin and my eyes, and then there was a deeper knowing, which didn’t let my shallow knowing in on the secret, just made me step step step in front and along the path. But I trusted it, because it came from right inside of me, where the roots had found. And the roots found him.
In the before, I was sure I knew him, until the time I was made to watch him decay. The truth showed me this, it showed me his hate, his mood swings and arguments, the trampling paths he made through the forest without caring what he stepped on. It showed me the future, a future away from me. But not alone. I saw his adultery and I saw him make laws only to secretly break them, but punish others who followed. And then I saw him hurting, and weak and crying. And I saw illness, I saw his decrepit body fill with parasites. I saw him die.
When I came back to the Now the vines between us were dried and browning.
