Certain Clarity
There I was, in a cave, with my used to be imaginary nightmare, but nope, I was awake and I definitely wasn’t imagining any of it. Not strands of obsidian framing his concerned expression. Not my lack of clothing beyond my sporty bra and undies. And certainly... most ardently certain- not the heat of his body in proximity to mine.
It was all REAL!
Him. Er- Moon. Me! Ugh.
Me... recognizing him for, well, just soooo many reasons.
Every weird shred of something that had twisted from my, previous, mental obscurity. All when I was on the cusp of living. Really living... figuring out if I wanted to attend a technical college. Or pick cherries for a living. Or work for Cabin Crush. Or run my own Archery Range. I would call it ‘Aim True’.
Or something like that.
But really and truly, how about simply learning that I actually liked myself, beyond the scope of what the world might tell me.
Scream at me. Push... at me.
All of that... that was the stuff I wanted to be concerned with.
Not this. Not him.
Not Moon.
Though I knew I was most definitely looking at him... up close, breathing near him, touching him, warming up... next to him. Hmm... All that. All of it while ensconced in firelight and the everlasting dripping of a mountain spring- well, none of that meant anyone else could see him.
Or EVER would.
I sighed, certain of my return to the epic frustration of my youth. Being alone. Or at least, at times, looking alone. Mayhap many of the times. Time. All the time.
A swift redosing of reality would be my déjà vu lifestyle. Always looking like a loon around other people, when I was simply trying to interact with a shadow. Just like back then.
There is a certain clarity which sets in mentally, nay emotionally, when shadowy memories emerge from their broken edged hiding places. When piecing together what was once, parts of my past, my life before I remembered what was remarkably true, couldn’t help but expand my mental universe. Emotional universe. My spiritual grasp of it all.
Everything fell into line. Memories, ideas, hopes...
My younger life beside Moon, eternally lurking at the edge of light, emerged. I found playback of myself forever reaching toward my future never fully realizing that my future would never, in fact, reach back for me. Not with him.
“Do you even know what I’ve been through? What my life has been like, just to keep any semblance of sanity?” My breathing quickened, painfully so, “I see a therapist! Experiencing…” I held in a sob realizing the depth of dreariness I had traveled through, trying to finally get to somewhere else. Some WHEN else. “Having you in my life left me having to- needing to- never wanting to... talk to a professional. Just to cope with this... this... this maelstrom of memories. Let alone move on or... or actually have a life. Mostly, I had no idea why I kept going. I hated it. I hated every bit of it, every ticking minute of each session each week. I hated it. Then knowing I would have to go back again the next time the calendar read Tuesday. I hated Tuesdays! The immense relief I felt when each Tuesday session was over but the foreboding of what the next week would bring. What my thoughts would bark up? What words would I have to speak aloud, making them... making them real, or cursing me to doubt myself. All because you found me out of everyone else.” I caught his eye, “Anyone... else.”
I felt dizzy. I was still drowning in that spring, I had to be, with no desire to break the surface. No one could keep living with this much dark garbled brain chatter. It didn’t feel possible, nor fractionally probable.
No way.
No Fraking way!
My chest felt tight, too tight for speaking. I needed my inhaler. Or I needed to just let it happen, just die, give up, finally. Stop breathing.
It would be... so... easy...
“Twin breathes of this,” Moon spoke close to my ear, yanking my mind from it’s frequented dark path, onto other things like light and living. I sucked in the albuterol, wiling myself to face all this mess, all the horrible and the real and the unwanted. I exhaled on a sob. Releasing another opportunity to just stop existing, stop the struggle. Another inhale puff of Albuterol. I held it in, fat tears cliff jumping over my cheeks, there was no alternative, dropping into sorrow puddles on bronze. I was so wretchedly miserable inside.
So cold, so sad and so over any of it.
“You keep this with you?” Moon asked, his gaze gesturing at my pendant.
“I always have.” He seemed in awe of it, earlier, his sights had been locked on it, though I could have sworn he was eyeing something else entirely. Why would my arrowhead matter to him? “It felt like driving through dense fog, trying to remember exactly how I found it.” I glanced down at it, braced between my fingers, the warmed edge pressing along my skin. Obsidian that had seen hundreds of years, yet it was still so smooth. Someone used it forever ago, shaped it, needed it to live. Or at least, kept it close to them, rubbing along its smoother parts, in case they needed to use it. “It felt too special to put away. Or forget about.” I breathed a few times, wanting to be honest in spite of his layers of lies. ”Too old to be lost.” Obsidian, dark, smooth. Like Moon’s hair.
“Near your...heart.” He whispered with awe.
Within one breath, one slow blink, I’m not there anymore. I’m some time else.
I close my fingers over obsidian strands, long enough to be a bookmark and sigh out a frustrated breath. “That Moon! He is utterly infuriating! Always being all mysterious and vague and beautiful-“
Well, eh hmm. “Stunning really, but enough about his face and hair... and body. He is sooo vexing. Frustrating!”
I huff my way up the few sun-warmed, painted wood steps to the deck and let the forest green screen door slam shut behind me. I’m determined to stash a part of him where no one will go looking. Not at the lake. Certainly not in the Curley cabin.
“I know! I’ll stash it in a book!”
An OLD book with no interest to anyone other than myself. Seemingly ever, if it’s safe to gauge its popularity by a tight book spine. The creak of newness upon opening it which should feel repetitive and boring. Quiet. But Mysteries of Udolpho, while being an old hardback copy, is still creaky new inside, to other human eyes. Aside from Mine.
His hair mark, which I choose to call his token of strands becoming a bookmark, will be safe left there, even for a few summers worth of visitors to the Curley Cabin. To it’s wide set of built-in bookshelves on either side of a huge river stone fireplace. I will find it again.
It will prove him as real in my reality.
At least, I hope...
I kiss his strands, sealing their fate, as I stash my favorite horridly, terrible book as far back and hidden from the light as I can reach.
Near my heart… and my hope…
Yes, Moon was correct. I did keep it near my heart. Yet, never knowing that was precisely why. “Yeah.” I answered him, flashing back to my current predicament. I had to get out of his cave. Out of his arms, or I would go out of my mind! Staring at my arrow perched on the shallow ledge, I pondered, could it really be that simple? The proof- the evidence I needed, to connect the pieces? The trail? My path?
So simple...
I promised myself then and there, that I would go the very next day- when hypothermia was no longer a risk. When I thawed out and my head cleared. When I was not shaking with a chill that bled deeper than skin, deep into my bones. A chill running down my spine, flaring along nerve pathways, keeping me there, locked in Moon’s cave. In Moon’s arms.
In my shadow’s embrace.
I took a shaky but deeper breath in, sighing it out.
Moon was real.
Moon had my arrow.
He had been by me from the moment I stepped foot at the Ranger Station. He’d been at the cultural site of a beautifully entrancing Me-Wuk village. Right across the street from the Ranger Station, where the grinding stone lay still, unchanged through way more than decades. Well, other than modern litter found scattered about after rowdy lake-goers stumbled through it as a shortcut to their cabins or campgrounds. The audacity. Moon had been watching me from the shadows, when I was with Kai, following us, following me from the very beginning. The moment I saw pine- he knew. The moment I dared step foot onto dark forest floor. He knew. Like he used to.
If my memories made any sense...
He used to watch me, follow me. I had never known with any clarity that he wasn’t just my very elaborate imaginary friend, complete with a historical background fitting of the mountain. That my brain had been filled with the history and lore of a people who once filled the bark umuchas with life, the forest with their noise and light. Families and love and survival and breathing in fresh air. Just living. Moon had been here for all of that, he was a conduit for learning about them- the Me-Wuk people. His family. I felt that I knew too much about them for being so, well, me. Like I was an intruder. I had loved hearing their customs and stories and he had loved to talk about them, weaving fantastical imagery of their myths, their ideas. His words had enamored me of the history of his family, his tribe.
And yet, why had he ended up alone? What wasn’t he telling me?
Why was he banished? Or cursed?
If I went by what MBG told me, in as few words and as vaguely as possible, then his curse had a lot to do with a girl who... wasn’t... me.
The love of his life.
She who perished.
Or was murdered...
