Aleitha - Flash fiction

Aleithia

I start to open one eye slowly, but it’s too bright so I shut it tight. I’m awake, but wish I was still asleep and dreaming.  The dreams are my life. For ten years  I have lived in dreams, and sleepwalked through the waking world. 

Perhaps, this was inevitable. No memories are earlier than the question that centered my morning, “Joey, what were your dreams?”

My parents weren’t mystics, or if they were they wouldn’t have admitted it. They were, as was popular to say among their people, “grounded in the faith.” Their people prized certainty like the most precious of metals. Liberals traded in nuance and complexity. We sought pure faith worth more than gold.  Doubt was an enemy kept at bay, by loud recitals of the truth. We wrapped ourselves in a warm blanket of certainty against an increasingly cold and faithless world.

Within the community of faith, my parents lived with wide-eyed wonder beyond the grasp of other members with their fixation on certainty.

So the days began, “Joey what were your dreams?”

With eyes closed I roll my head the other way, and I again slowly open one. My left one.  Always the left, so that the first waking images hit my intuitive, mystical right hemisphere, and it can speak  before the logical left gets a voice. I open the left eye first because of Aleithia, my love.

Aleithia found me in no man’s land between the faithful and the faithless, shell-shocked from the death of my god and brought me to herself.

We met in senior seminar. Four years after freshman anthropology, where I had learned that god was dead, and only the most primitive held to such superstitions. I lost god, and I stopped dreaming. I lived in the dead world where beauty is false and the only truth is that we are a random collection of urges. In this empty universe, our flesh and our bones crawl over this sun scorched earth driven by nothing but the randomness of our dna, and its will to propogate.

In senior seminar I recited our creed with the rest that beauty is illusion, and god is dead. She. Aleithia, heard me recite the liturgy and she came to me.

After the last class, she spoke to me for the first time.

“What’s your name?”

“Joey.”

Before I could ask hers, “Joey, you don’t want what you said to be true.”

Defensively. “What I want or don’t want has nothing to do with what is.”

Smilingly a little sadly, “You could not be more mistaken.  I am dancing tonight, come and see and you will begin to understand.”

She danced in the old campus chapel, the anthropology prof called a testament to the power of superstition.  She stood alone eyes down waiting for the music began. As the music began she turned her face to the heavens and I was undone. Tears I could not explain flowed freely, from an un-dammed stream of longing.

She found me after the dance, already dismissing the tears. “See Joey, there is beauty. If you want, you can explain it away. If you do you will lose your soul. But, if you want, you can choose to see beauty. You see Joey what you most deeply desire and what you choose to see is everything.”

I chose beauty. In choosing beauty I returned to God. I returned with the wonder my parents had known even amidst the certainty of their community. I returned through beauty, and beauty led me to mystery deeper than shallow certitude. Months later Aleithia read this to me. “In the future we will be mystics or we will be nothing.” 

I embraced mystery and cultivated my intuitive longing. I learned the complexity of the hemispheres of my mind, and my right side’s ability to embrace mystery and beauty. When Aleithia found me and returned me to God, I learned to truly see.

I again learned to dream.

I dream of Aleithia and her dancing. Then I awake, and I open my left eye so the first images of the waking day, play in the right hemisphere.

I open my left eye. I’m still in the attic. In this attic we hide from the fundamentalists - the godless and the god-fearing. They began burning the earth and each other ten years after our wedding.  We have hid for ten years. We hide on the side of the godless, because they are slightly more likely to be humane when they find us - but make no mistake they are fundamentalists. We hide in the attic, waiting for the endless war to end and look out on the world they have painted grey with death.

This morning I open my eye, I see that Aleithia is not beside me. I look at the roof where jagged rusting nails poke through and intermittent holes let in rain in a storm, and now the light of the morning.  I see it all first with my left eye - my eye of mystical vision. I see dust particles dancing a timeless dance across the rays of light - universes unto themselves.

.

I look towards the window, and there is Aleithia her unwashed hair loose, thick and in knots down past her shoulders. When we met it was jet-black, it is now shot through with grey.  Her back is to me. She is praying kneeling on the floor. Her feet once covered with elegant slippers are bare and filthy. She does not know I am awake. It is only her and God.

She stands and faces me though she can’t see that I’m awake. The once smooth skin around her eyes is dark and lined. She is (as am I) deathly pale from being trapped inside ten years.

She is going to dance to music only she can hear.

She begins eyes down on the floor, and then she lifts them to the heavens and begins the dance of the ages before an audience of one.

I have not seen her dance since we began hiding. I am undone. In this moment I know the truth of beauty. Aleithia dances even here.