You must leave me here, Raelyn said to her brother. I have entered the upper chambers of the earth’s heart and the dry red dust is what’s left of me.
But Justin said he would not leave her alone under Balanced Rock as night seeped in, slow tears carving luminous channels down his cheeks. Skin against bone, the pain like sky everywhere in her, she said to him just above a whisper, you must let me go into this desert. Because I have arrived to it already and it has arrived in me and we are now overlapping. It offers its quiet embrace of sandstone and wind, like a small folded prayer, and I have accepted it, as one might a few words scrawled on the back of a blank envelope no one has thought to send.
I will choose to keep what’s inside to myself, she said, and Justin felt the tiredness multiplied in her eyes, a palpable weight, like two rooms filled to the ceiling with lead, a celestial gravity sinking her into the oxidized dust. She sat on the ground that gave up its heat as if compelled to do so, then lay across it straightening her fragile arms at her sides, waiting for the first couple stars to pierce the indigo canopy of her containment like the smallest xylophone notes, sounding out their simple two-note eulogy, then three, then a thousand, then millions. Raelyn reached for the crescent moon as though it were a single handhold chiseled into an infinite rockface. She heard the distant howl of a coyote moving through the grasslands. The occasional fleck of a meteor from the Perseids asked that she remember what wonder felt like, to think of how the heavens moved, in flickers and by great absorptions of galaxies, but in between everything, there was no sign of life other than the wisps of her own short breaths.
Justin said he loved her, kissed her on the forehead as she lay there, let go of her hand, and started back down the trail knowing he would not hear her voice again. Once the sound of his shoes shuffling across the gravel faded into the buzz of the katydids, Raelyn breathed deeply of the darkening blue dusk and it felt cool in her stomach and cooler against her throat. Justin had set a bottle of water by her and she thought about drinking it, lips like sandpaper, but decided instead to fall in love with her thirst like the burning residue of an eclipse.
How did I get here, from what beginning? What has this momentary flash called life divulged to me? What will it feel like to be everything and nothing all at once? I am convinced, now at the end, I was never fully myself.
One question Raelyn could not extricate herself from, the one that took root in the twilight of her sleepless nights, the one that cast her out into the expanse to consider how a broken line might somewhere, by some unfathomable logic, continue, was whether she wanted to return to this world. Mursin posed it as a practical choice rather than as a test of her attachment to life, the Cambodian monk she had visited earlier that year in a small nondescript Buddhist temple outside Boulder. She asked him if that meant she would come back in the past or reappear in the future, as someone or something, and if so, how far back would it be or how far ahead. He said he could not promise a direction or distance or form. It depended on how her affections for the world would accrete, how they would find shape as a mist that rises off the rocks at dawn. Mursin tied a light blue piece of string around her wrist, a blessing cord, and chanted in Pali, I go to the enlightened one for refuge. I let go of what I cannot carry with me.
At the time of departure, Mursin said a swan-like bird would come as a messenger and gather up her soul. She had until then to decide, to listen to her heart for its willingness, as it took into account the entirety of her path: breathing the air, seeing the mountains, loving her family, stumbling into relationships and out of them, nursing the hurts of childhood unaware of how brittle they made her, losing her son in childbirth, dancing in the streets of Pamplona at 4 am, feeling the bliss of a Black Rock Desert sunrise unobscured by clouds, crying under a 250 year old banyan tree in Kolkata, sleeping in a field of lilacs with her first husband, painting a watercolor of the Atlantic while sitting on a dock in Bar Harbor during a storm, the blues and grays and blacks swimming into each other like a blurred kaleidoscope of foreboding and exhilaration.
How much do I love the world? Let’s say I don’t love it as much as I should, or not as others might, how could I come back to some different combination of it, as myself or someone else or something else, with no memory of my fulfilments or yearnings, all that churn of thought, all that I have lived and forgotten, the battering tides of it, and no sense that it could turn out any other way?
Mursin described this as feeling the insipid sting of a pre-darkness, an end point before the middle point before the beginning. A going backwards, he said in his placid way, and that she should allow herself to be taken into it.
Now with every star having revealed itself, barely visible shadows of red-tailed hawks circling at elevation, Raelyn felt it harder to breath. Each breath she took hitched mid-stream, coming up against the same stone wall. Still laying on her back under Balanced Rock, she felt her heart slow, her blood hesitate in its constricted course, her thoughts stretching apart, fracturing into single random words like yes and yesterday and earring. Then came a flapping, another loud flutter, and another, white hazy flashes of arrival like soft lightning. One to the left. One to the right. Two more just past her feet. Enormous white swans with long arcing necks, wings unfurling as they landed to ensure their balance under Balanced Rock, sloping triangular beaks of glowing orange, serene and smooth.
You’ve come for me.
One by one, the swans lowered their heads and rested them on her body. The warmth of them made Raelyn realize how long she had laid there shivering. But soon the trembling stopped. She stopped breathing. Her heart stopped and yet she remained illuminated under the white light of the swans outlined by the towering round shadow of Balanced Rock. She felt an inviolable patience in her visitors, a love, but one with stark lines, encased by obligation, suspended over her.
Why so many of you? Where will you take me? I do not want to go backward and I do not want to go forward.
Without exchange of thought, their answers accumulated like a reverberation of voice in a deep canyon. They needed to turn her into an ethereal imprint for safe passage, so the others would know. Raelyn asked what others and they answered in unison all the others who find themselves in between. You should know that the sun will no longer shine here if we do not return you to it.
So I am the sun. I have always been the sun.
Yes and no. Some are endings. Others float in the middle. But you are origin.
Is that my next life upon this world, or might I live above it, if I am the sun?
The swans raised their heads and with a flap and a step or two forward, each settled on top of her, covering her, causing her to feel even warmer, an incubation of something in her spirit. They conveyed that they had not taken her back to the sun yet because she had not decided. With a soft collective huff, they asked if she wanted to be the sun or be dispersed among the mountains. It scratched open a truth in who she was, ever since those long summer days as a child in Plano, Texas when she stood outside over her toys strewn across the dirt of her yard. She would not pick any one thing to play with, not her Care Bears, not her Strawberry Shortcake, not her Barbie Big Wheel. She would stand over them all and just look. She could not choose because she didn’t want to close the door on something else that would have brought her joy. As long as she held out, as long as she resisted the foreclosure of picking one thing over another, everything remained possible. She could go anywhere and be anything.
If I don’t choose, will you do it for me?
They said they couldn’t and would stay with her until she decided: backward, forward, restored to the sun, or dispersed among the mountains. Raelyn then did something none of her collectors expected. She stood up out of her body, which startled them into wing flaps and small urgent flights, rising and landing around her and rising again, encircling her physical form as they had when they arrived. Then she began to walk north up Balanced Rock Trail as they stared after her with their long craning necks. That trail became Strausenback Trail, which carried her into the southern interior of the park, across little rises and down into narrow gulleys through the night shadows of the sage-like shrubs and scattered junipers. Raelyn kept walking, no longer hurting anywhere, held in the quiet starlight and cool air. She decided she would continue this way, unhurried, wandering, for as long as she did, she could remain in the most beautiful state of equipoise, the kind that emanated from Mursin and the swans and the crescent moon and from all those who see the world as it is, as it exists in its entirety, not needing it to provide for them any longer and not asking it for anything it was unwilling to give.
She was neither sun nor earth, neither air nor water, and so she wondered how her brother would receive her in the land the Gods had neglected. For she had been the first to walk away and choose nothing over something, the in-between, the equanimity that had for so long eluded her.
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