That’s part of the cost.
I’d thought that, to accomplish all I had to do, a barrier around my emotions would be helpful. And this was the apathetic wall I had to show for it. I’d been building up my shields in the last few weeks, taking them down less and less, strengthening them by constant use. With Menessos bouncing all over my emotional trampoline, and my being absent from this place of cleansing and release, I’d been reinforcing these shields with the mortar of pain, guilt, denial, and mourning.
But strength had to be balanced with vulnerability. Closing off to the negatives meant not being open to the positives.
I understood what I’d done now, but undoing this damage would not be easy. Nor should it be.
I leaned over the water and looked at my reflection.
I could leave this murky shield alone. Let it get thick and so solid it would never come down.
My eyes adjusted to see through that reflection, to the things under the surface, the stream bed, the stones.
Nana once told me how if you peer into a stream during the day you see your reflection. But if you look in the stream on a moonless night, you’ll see the stream bed. She’d said, “You’ve been exposed to the dark, so you’re seeing below the surface, now, Persephone. You’re seeing the beauty in the smooth stones, but you must also feel the slime covering them. Slime that, if you’re not mindful of your footing, will cause you to slip . . .”
I’d slipped. There was slime on me that would make me someone I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be unable to care, to be cold and indifferent. I’d rather be strong and vulnerable.
In that instant I stood and clawed at the murky surface of emotion. Rending a hole, I released those feelings I’d resisted and fought against. Sobbing and staggering further into the river, I tried to use those emotions, to convert them into anger and rage, to fuel the destruction of that barrier. But the wave of anguish was too strong, the barrier too thick. The more I dug at the shield, the deeper the emotion became. Relentless, I tore until my fingers, in the meditation, were bloody.
There, in the middle of the river, as the grief and fear and loss and doubt and pain poured out of me in a flood down my cheeks, I stumbled. The current caught me and threw me under the surface.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The river dragged me, yanking me desperately along, mocking me, heaving me to my feet and permitting me to slosh a few steps toward the bank. I retched and gagged. Then another wave pounced, shoving me under the surface again. I fought to rise above it, but the water quashed me, twisted and wrung me, stifling every attempt.
These emotions are too powerful. You don’t want them.
Immersed, drowning, I grappled with the rushing current, too stubborn to surrender. Surfacing amid white rapids, I gasped once before plummeting over a high falls. I was pinned at its base, buried under the weight of the water pouring down on me.
Yes. I. Do. They’re mine!
All I had left was this fight. I curled into a ball and scrabbled for the edges of large rocks to hold on to. Using them, I wrenched myself away from the imprisoning, crushing weight of the falls. Then the current plucked me loose and whisked me away again. This time it wouldn’t let me surface.
I thought of what I’d said to Menessos about being his master, about accepting it. The good and the bad. But I hadn’t accepted the good and the bad emotions of my own life. How could I balance a world if I couldn’t balance myself, couldn’t accept the good and the bad of what I had, inevitably, to face?
I kicked my feet and stretched for the bottom, raking already bleeding hands along the riverbed searching for something heavy enough to anchor me. I clung to the first large stone I could keep a grip on.
The current tugged at me, wrenching me and the stone free, dragging me slowly along the bottom, scraping my fingers against other rocks. But still, I would not let go.
I will not be swept away. Not by any emotion! I accept what it means. The good and the bad. The good and the bad!
The river hurled both the stone and me onto the muddy embankment. I landed on my back. My arms flew over my head guiding the stone to thunk into the soft ground there.
A tree leaned over me, branches low. I started to sit up, but the stone rested heavily on a portion of my hair. After slithering around in the mud, struggling without enough leverage to roll away the offending rock, I finally managed and sat up. I wanted to rise and stomp away, but the branches of this mighty tree made standing up impossible.
I lingered, considering. The river had deposited me under a willow tree laden with some kind of wispy moss. As my awareness of the area spread further, what I saw before me was no longer a river, but a lake with water so blue and smooth it made me calmer just to see it. The picturesque lake was framed by distant forested mountains. The sharp shapes revealed a particularly jagged glacier had carved this land.
Nearer to me, a craggy, sun-bleached face of stone thrust up from the water like a giant’s spearhead rammed into the earth. The white reflection of the bare stone on the water’s surface was the only break in the blue, like a single cloud in the sky.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
I twisted in the mud. “Amenemhab!”
“Hello, Persephone. Needed a change of scenery?”
I crawled out from under the low branches and sat near the jackal who served as my totem animal. “I hear mud is supposed to be good for your skin, but I can’t say I like it.” I couldn’t wipe my face clean, my hands were covered in it. I tried to get one hand mostly clean with the other. It wasn’t working. With a glare at the placid and benign surface of the lake, I decided not to attempt washing it off just yet.
“I’m putting this to memory so I can always remember you this way.”
“Naked and covered in mud. Gee, thanks.”
“I see you more as bathed in the element of water, and coated with earth for good measure.” His nasal-haughty and matter-of-fact tone meant he was being literal; totems aren’t typically sarcastic. Didn’t keep me from letting loose my own cynical humor, though.
“You make it sound like some hallowed initiation. Like a baptism. I didn’t think lofty spiritual conventions were supposed to include this much muck.”
He laughed.
I gave up trying to be cleaner. For now. “I’m not sure why I’m in a new place.” The sun was dipping across the lake preparing to set. Fingerlike rays stretched through the moss and the slender willow branches. It was a peaceful scene and, although I was caked with mud, it evoked serenity in me. Or maybe I felt grounded because I was covered in it.
“Examine where you are.”
“The mud capital of the world,” I muttered.
Amenemhab turned away, muzzle closed. Totems didn’t suffer fools who evaded answering their questions.
“By a lake. Near a willow tree. There’s moss. And a rock that nearly smashed my skull.”
He sat patiently.
“The river, now a lake, threw me out.” And the stone.
I pushed back the curtain of lance-shaped leaves. A snapping sound preceded the dropping of a small branch onto the stone. “Sorry,” I mumbled to the tree. I hadn’t meant to break anything.
Shadows swung across the surface of the rock as the breeze rustled the drooping branches on the other side. There was a texture to the stone, mostly hidden under the mud. Dropping to my knees, I crawled under the low branch again to examine it better. The fallen branch had landed across the rock, and pieces of moss wound around the stick’s length. I reached out and pushed it from the stone top.