Page 71 of Things Get Dark
“It was you growing from adversity.” Gabriel’s voice is gentle but firm. “Instead of hiding from it or letting it ruin you.”
Cynicism peeks out from behind the ever-encompassing joy of existence. “Is everything a lesson with you?”
Dimples erupt as he smirks playfully. “Is everything a lesson withyou?”
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
“Doing what?”
“Being nice.”
“It’s like I said. You seem nice. You deserve kindness.”
“You’re really hot. You could do way better than me.”
“Rocketing through paradise, reborn anew, and all you can think about is a hot guy?”
Heat rushes to my face. Must be the fire. “I just feel lonely, is all.”
Gabriel sits in silence, waiting.
“I’ve been kinda fucked up since my boyfriend left me a couple years ago. Five years together, and then nothing. And my dad died, and I graduated late, and that left me feeling like a failure, and then everything fell behind from there. I just want someone to love me.”
“I love you.” He says it so easily, no hesitation.
I stare back at him. Whereas his words came immediately, mine catch in my throat. “I…I think I love you, too.”
He leans in at the same time I do, our bodies moving harmoniously. Our lips press together, golden light cascading out. Atomic bombs explode deep in the tissue of my lips.
When the ecstasy subsides into something subtler, yet no less divine, I pull away to see my own face, my own body, in front ofme. My face smiles back at me as I look into my own eyes, real before me, for the first time. Innocence curls around the corner of his lips, and purity dances around his eyes. My lips. My eyes.
“Why are you me?” I ask. Stillness echoes through my body.
“I’ve always been you.”
My head turns away, my mind reeling. I dig my feet into the dirt, trying to ground myself. Dust works its way between my toes.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“You remember that one yoga class you went to? And the instructor said, ‘You are not your body, you are the witness’?”
I nod.
“Well,” the being before me says, a sly smile spreading across his face, “I’m the witness.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Everything you experience is through the lens of something or someone else.”
Even his voice has changed now. Years ago, at university, we experimented with voice recording. It seemed normal for everyone to hate their own voice when they listened to it back, and I was no exception. But now, my own voice didn’t sound quite so nasally, quite so abrasive. It just sounded like a human voice.
“Fire can’t burn itself. Scissors can’t cut themselves. Human consciousness often struggles to be with itself. So we live in the external world of fish and birds and other human beings. If you think about something you love, it’s always something that’s outside of yourself. But you are everything else. Everything else is you. Don’t you deserve love, too?”
“I…I thought I did.” The emptiness inside me that I’ve been trying to ignore for years taps at my heart, no longer hidden deep within. “Now I’m not so sure.”
“Why?” My own eyes stare so deeply, so earnestly at me.
“I just haven’t done life right,” I say. “Everything I tried to do failed. And now it feels like it’s too late.”