Things Get Dark

Chapter Four

By the time I make it through the clearing, the bird has disappeared. So has most of the greenery. In its place are makeshift huts, hodgepodges of sticks, clay, and sprawling green leaves. Heat crackles towards me, and I take a seat by a small fire, noticing a strip of fabric around my waist. The flames lick the air like lost lovers reunited, hungry and passionate.

“It’s amazing what a little fire can do.”

That voice. Angel, fish, bird. Now human.

Gabriel walks round the corner of a hut, a few dead rabbits hanging from a band wrapped round his waist. A scrap of fabric is the only thing he’s wearing. Despite the majesty of the journey I’m on, I can’t help but find myself staring at his body. Lean, muscular, perfect for hunting.

“Brought us down from the trees and into the rest of the world,”

he continues, sitting down next to me.

His bare leg brushes against mine, and I pull away gently, hiding under a shifting crossing of legs. He doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he hasn’t looked up at me at all. Instead, he perches on the end of the log, cuts a rabbit from his makeshift belt, and lays it on a makeshift table. He pulls out a stone knife—from where, I couldn’t tell you. As he lifts it up, I turn my head and close my eyes.

Explosions of red play out against the darkness of my eyelids. Streaks of crimson and burgundy mingle together, dancing in time to the sound of the knife smashing against the wood. Then softer, peeling sounds, and I feel myself convulse. An image of my own body stands before me, surrounded by endless black. Thin, unsubstantial, built wrong, like a child smashing puzzle pieces together.

My skin begins to fall off, peeling back to reveal the sinew and muscle beneath. My breath would catch were it not for the muscles falling away too, leaving my lungs hanging there like limp sacks of unfulfilled potential. As my bones begin to crack and splinter, my organs spill out, slapping against the ground. Finally, my bones snap, the last semblance of something humanoid falling away until I’m nothing more than a witness to my own destruction. Then everything succumbs to darkness.

Devoid of substance, of anything other than the despair in which my consciousness marinates, I sit in absence.

I lose track of my sense of self.

There is no me.

I am gone.

Until I hear a spark. Suddenly, the remnants of my body, ashen upon the floor, are ablaze, flames spreading. Heat rages into me. Everything burns with dazzling light and then there I am, crawling out of the heap of dust I used to be. The flicking of flames carries me higher until I stand, feet firmly planted on the dregs of drought.

Energy courses through my renewed body. I feel strong. I feel capable. I feel ready.

“See what I mean?”

Gabriel asks.

The rabbit is roasting on the fire, the husky scent of charring meat drifting about. Gabriel is looking at me, eyes beaming straight into my soul.

“What was that?”

I ask. “I feel reborn.”

“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 with you?”

“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 of me. 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.”

Silence.

“I’m just not sure why I’m here, what I’m doing. I can’t tell you if there’s any meaning to my life or to life in general. It just all seems so empty sometimes.”

“Why would that stop you from deserving love?”

“I just don’t feel like I deserve it.”

“Oh, honey.”

My own hand feels soft against my cheek, my words so unusual to my ears. “You don’t have to do anything to deserve love. You don’t have to achieve anything or accomplish something specific. You just wake up each morning, and there’s the love. You go about your life, your ordinary life, and there’s the love. You pay council tax, do laundry, hang out with friends, struggle with work colleagues, read a book, watch crap TV, and there’s the love.”

“It just doesn’t feel like enough.”

“Many people feel that way. Our world has done a number on us. But that’s why it’s up to us to act as beacons of what radical self-love can look like. That’s why I love you.”

“I…”

But the words don’t come.

“You said it when you thought I was someone else.”

My companion reaches across and begins carving meat off the rabbit. The repulsion that captured me before seems to have fled. My stomach is unsettled for another reason.

“I understand,”

he says, but his voice has changed again. I look over. Gabriel sits next to me. “Other-love is always easier than self-love. We don’t spend enough time with others to see their hidden faults. But think of it this way: I wouldn’t be sitting here right now without you. I don’t exist without you. You are fundamental to my existence. So if I’m worthy of love, it’s only because you’re capable of love. And beings capable of love are always worthy of love in return.”