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Scissoring: A Supernatural Love Story
Closing behind my entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept me, the door disappeared into a tangle of ivy; the dense and neglected walled garden before me drowsing, seducing, almost lightless. I wait a moment just inside the entrance and listen to the sudden stillness, feeling at once fearful of its dark nature yet strangely comforted by its protection. The rowan tree by the gate was, I suspect, most likely planted there to ward off witches or bad spirits. Beneath it sits an ancient stone bench, its chipped and eroded top covered with various cracked clay pots and saucers. Amidst the terra-cotta and lichened jumble I spot the rusted blades of a small pair of garden scissors. I pick them up, surprised they still open and close, their function long since supplanted by a sad and final relinquishment. I put the shears in my pocket. The irregular grass path beneath me stretches out into thick, dark undergrowth, stepping down and curving away between the oaks and gums and through the vines and thickets and evergreens that mark the perimeter. The wall runs out on either side of the gate, its length indeterminable and its height extending up to the lowest set of branches of the trees that frame it. The canopy is dense but does not give a sense of closeness; instead, it allows enough light to penetrate and slant along the tree trunks and across the honeysuckle and sumac and myrtle; falling too across the crumbling statues, their expressions tragic and inscrutable in the furtive shadows. I make my way along the path, down timeworn stone steps and across openings, past the neglected grottos and shrines set back into peaceful clearings; all vaguely familiar elements deeply dreamed and beautiful. I never want to leave here. Emerging suddenly into a little glade, the wilderness becomes pushed back and the peacefulness changes form with the evolving sunlight, no longer dappled with the shadows of noon, but filled with light and color and texture and the movement of air. I leave the grass path behind and move out into the glade, the ground around me thick with wildflowers and wild grasses. In my wake I create a new path out to the middle where I sit on a low stone boulder, feeling not alone but solitary, and the solitude closing about me, godlike and green with summer. I bask for a moment in the warm sunlight then slide off the boulder and into the wildflowers that have found a home naturalized in the glade. I remember the shears and take them from my pocket and bend down to snip off a single stem and as I’m holding it – studying the flowers’ elysian charm – I’m struck by a vague fragment of a memory: a face, and then nothing. Nothing. Is it possible to feel loneliness in paradise? I stand breathless for a moment, childlike, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the boundless garden. “Our souls are united.” Startled, I turn to see that I’m not alone. It was a voice with a slightly British accent that disturbed the stillness; from an older gentleman that has appeared from nowhere as though time was something he walked through as he did through air. I don’t feel threatened or alarmed as he seems friendly but not familiar, his expression mannerly and keenly anticipative. He doesn’t move, his wry smile fixed. “Please forgive my intrusion on your reverie.” He glides into the clearing, his movements graceful and precise, advancing and coming to a stop within a polite distance from me. Like that of a good butler, he seems capable of immense discretion; capable of guarding secrets and holding them closely, secrets as deep as the well of the world, as old as the first human spark. “The flower,” gesturing to the clipping in my hand, “is called phlox. Legend holds that it represents a love that stretches across time, unbroken: ‘Our souls are united.’” For a moment I’m lost and disoriented, still holding on to something so distant, so unattainable; as if I was human. And in that moment I know that I must be dead. Shaken, I look down at the flower, then at the man smiling before me, his hands clasped behind him in patient servitude, his refined bearing failing to reassure me or quiet my doubts about this abrupt paradise I’ve fallen into, unexplained. “I’m not sure where I am.” He nods. “That’s as it should be, given the circumstances.” I wait for him to elaborate, beginning to feel more than a bit uneasy. “Allow me introduce myself.” Now he enters my personal space, his hand extended. “My name is Heyward. I’m the watchman of the grounds.” I shake his hand and feel immediately at ease, but at the same time sense that my destiny is in his hands, and that destiny is being vouchsafed against the quality of my spirit. “What exactly does a watchman of the grounds do?” Heyward muses for an instant but says nothing. “This place,” as I look around us, “what is it, really? Why does it feel so familiar, so...intimate?” “You should recognize what you created; recognize the existence of love and passion and experience borne of the earth from which you had grown.” Even if only dimly, the thoughts coalesce: the opening of one door and the closing of another. Heyward intuits my conclusion: “Heaven? No, not quite. You have found yourself in an unnamed territory, an in-between world – a placeholder until all your earthly bonds are broken. But don’t fear it – you may have been lost, but now you are found.” I notice that the languid sun casts lengthening shadows on all the physical objects around me yet Heyward stands in a splendid isolation, removed from the laws of the natural world. “You’re an angel?” “As one whose interest is maintaining the status quo and restoring balance, I can tell you this much: our worlds are different but our goals are the same.” His expression turns grave. “Something is preventing you from moving on.” “I have no memory beyond the garden door.” “You must leave that world behind now.” I say nothing in response; awaiting clarity, I can’t even reason how to form a question. Heyward sighs. “Some souls are reluctant to transition, to move on; sometimes they are unable: they were taken suddenly, violently. Some disturbed souls are still attached to the physical world and must undergo a reorientation process; a healing. But then sometimes – and it’s quite uncommon I can assure you – sometimes there are two souls that are so perfectly paired with one another across time and past lives that they create what can only be described as a scissoring effect.” And he extends his arms and upturned hands out in a grand gesture: “Our souls are united.” Then becoming composed and serious, “I’m here to restore balance, and to repair the effect.” “Is there some sort of cosmic law that I’ve broken?” He shakes his head. “Imagine the soul’s energy as something that cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms and evolve. It becomes displaced, like water and waves. But it’s always returned. And it’s not all written down in some big book somewhere because everything – change, constancy, patterns – abides by the same divine principles.” He shrugs dramatically. “These are ancient and unmitigated rules, the process taintless and incorruptible.” “Until it’s all thrown out of balance.” “Yes.” “I’m sorry to be such a burden.” Heyward smiles; consoling. “It’s to be expected when one tends the gardens of the human heart.” “I’ve seen her face – when I held the flower.” This clearly worries Heyward. “Her energy is pulling you back. But know this: there are only ever two real choices: move on or cease to exist. Your soul has been put in peril by this scissoring, being drawn away from the light of God’s perfect love, drawn away by doubt and fear and questions, drawn back by a beating human heart filled with puny human desire and wanting.” “It doesn’t seem so puny when your heart is real and aching. It seems cruel that love can’t remain.” “Human love is a human concern. As such, it gets left behind as the higher self moves on to another plane, one where the effluvium of broken human bonds forged by the ugly mechanics of flesh and blood and memory will become gloriously transformed. Yes, and that abundant and endless love – the returned soul, newly born – that will be your Heaven. But if that silver cord remains uncut, and you find yourself awakened to an in-between world, you either choose to blindly stumble back down the path behind you, or be lovingly guided through the darkest tunnel and into the light. And the answer to your question: There can be no loneliness in paradise. Reject that love, and you will be left with nothing.” “Then I have nothing left.” The sun is hiding behind the trees now, peering through in shocked indifference. “You have the remains of the day. You still have free will. Self-determination to make one final, human choice. Come with me; once the human heart stops beating, the cord will be cut.” Astonished, “I’m not dead then?” “I never said that you were. You are, however, at the door. And this place – this garden that was created out of the detritus of seeking and the travails of finding and losing love – will cease to exist if memory catches up to you, if all that lingering energy from your mortal existence begins to resurface. Is opening the door on the past worth forfeiting an entrance to paradise? Come with me. Beyond the garden door...lies nothing.” “No, you’re wrong. There must be something more.” I speak her name and there’s a pause, a suspension at a point between immobility and absolute motion, where the shadows that won’t let me go fall away and where all I can feel is a cruel wanting: “Kalin.” Heyward stiffens, looks down. “Yes.” “I don’t feel that I belong here. I’m scared.” “She’s as scared as you. And as alone.” Then he hesitates, debating, calculating, and adds: “She blames herself for what happened.” In that instant, I despise him for making the choice for me. “Why tell me that now?” “Because it’s time.” The sun sits on top of the garden wall, exhausted. “No, my soul will die without her. I’m nothing without Kalin. You told me that: ‘Our souls are united.’” “Ah, but unions can be severed. You can’t be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. All that energy must belong somewhere. It must be returned.” He pauses, considering. “You can’t change immutable laws. Come with me.” Heyward takes my arm and I tense, sensing my own fragility and impotence against the clutch of his timeless and unchangeable laws. “I remember everything. All of it. I can see it all now.” Alarmed by my urgency, his grip tightens and I plead, “She needs me. I can feel it. She’s about to do something desperate.” Heyward grimaces and it chills me. The glade – the phlox and wildflowers and grasses, and beyond them the myriad and primeval forest – all the living things about me begin to lose their form, not from the fading light but from a gathering desiccation, a withering; the grass path dematerializing ahead of trembling statues, then even the enshrouded wall begins to falter and in that entropic moment, the words reach me: “She has the scissors pressed against her neck.” I don’t know which one of us says it because I’ve broken free of Heyward’s grip and begun to run back down the rapidly fading path; the woods around me fading too into the dusk overtaking me, back into the immemorial darkness, the trees and vines and grass back into the earth from which the garden had sprung; the wall, the statues – all the human contrivances of my false reality – crumbling, decaying, and disappearing. I come up suddenly on where the gate should be and it too begins to fade from sight as I lunge against it and tumble out, but not before I turn and see it all displaced by the last dying glint of sunlight and Heyward unmoved, untouched, standing there bemused in his freeze frame of splendid isolation. There’s nothing left around me now but an impenetrable darkness and the breathless sensation of free-falling through it, of being pulled back and shot down a vertical dark tunnel, like an unstoppable train rushing headlong to its imminent doom, being drawn by an irresistible force that exists independently of free will and thought. I’m struck by an acute awareness that at the end of the tunnel there’ll be no warm white light to guide me, just the jet-black eternal nothingness of my human choice. And I don’t even mind that because the choice I made was never really mine to make: “Kalin...” She has the scissors pressed against her neck, a slight throbbing against the carotid. A single point of blood appears and runs down along the blade. I reach for the scissors but I’m evanescent and dissolving into light, my form altering, not only in mass and shape but color too, approaching the color of wind. She’s crying, the tears falling onto the note angled on the desktop she’s bent over and I can see the words This world... and the scissors pierce further and the blood becomes a trickle as I desperately grab for her hand but I’m lighter than air, and then I see the rest of it: ...more lonely than heaven, more empty than hell. I whisper in my wind voice, “There’s something more Kalin,” and she looks up, the scissors still pressed. I’m translated by the stillness about us: “There’s something beyond this world. I know it is, I’ve seen it, touched it. There’s something beyond the blood, skin, bowels, and bone; there’s a Heaven meant for you, Kalin, but you must live this life to gain it. Don’t grow your spirit in a garden of scissors, and don’t forfeit your paradise. Open up your soul.” This time I reach out for her hand, astonished to feel the warmth of her skin, the pulse of her blood running through her to my touch. Slowly, I guide her hand as she places the scissors on the desktop with a passionate and absolute relinquishment. The cord is cut; knowing that she’ll be fine, I don’t mind that I’ll be nothing. And I let go. ________________________ ...dissolving into light. Then she waits a moment and listens to the stillness. A single phlox, fragile and slightly damaged, has been left behind on the note. Considering the flower not with amazement but with a calm and detached serenity – not smiling or even reassured because that will come later – she picks it up and places it in the empty vase on the corner of the desk. It enters her mind that it will need water, too, so she gets up and takes it into the kitchen. She returns the vase to the desk corner, picks up the note and folds it carefully, then cuts it up into little pieces, then, finally, puts the scissors away.
#UnReal #Scissors #TrueLove #Sacrifice #Supernatural #Garden #Heaven #Limbo #Eternity
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