The Promise, Part Two

The human mind is a peculiar beast.

It can create reality when it's faced with something it doesn't like. We don't see things that are right in front of us. We see things that aren't there. Given enough stress, enough motivation, we can come right out of reality and into a world of our own making. What's left behind is an illusion, a shell - it may walk, talk, move about just as we would, but no one is home.

This state of removal is temporally elastic - it might last a moment or a lifetime. It may come and go. It may be a one-time thing. You may or may not know that what you're experiencing is your own illusion.

Under that fine old tree, knife between my knees, choice made, I was removed from reality.

If the day had been quiet before, now it was utterly still. If I looked hard enough, I would find birds mid-flight, frozen like a photograph. I could walk the world and find the whole of it like that. I knew this, so I didn't look.

I couldn't move, either. Wrists close enough to the blade to feel that first cold line of contact, I was as still as the moment before the chaos of creation. I felt as though my mind was as sharp as that blade. I could move my head. I was aware that I was not where I had been a moment ago (despite what my eyes told me), but I wasn't afraid.

I was (and still am) claustrophobic and I couldn't move, but I was not afraid.

In the last seven years I had been sexually abused, verbally abused, psychologically tortured, and bullied. I had seen some of the worst that people could do to a child. I had no reason to trust anyone, family or stranger.

I would have had every right to be frightened, but I wasn't.

I was...curious.

The world around me, although still, was the same. Before me, moving between the motes of light suspended in the ladders of sunbeams slanting through the trees, came a woman.

How do I describe her?

How do I describe the face of God? Or Goddess?

How do I put words to the face, the form? How did I put form to the concept of what I felt had to be deity...or close enough as makes no difference?

All in my mind, but as real as the keys I strike to type this telling.

She didn't look perfect, mind. She looked very human. Real enough that I could reach out and touch her, if only my hands would move. The hem of her skirt brushed low-hanging branches and fallen pine needles, and they swayed. She had a careworn face, and warm eyes that in memory have no one color but were the cosmos. Her hair was brown and hung in a braid.

While I remember what I saw down to the last tiny detail, it's pointless to try and describe it all here. Words on a screen can't possibly relate.

She was not beautiful, but she was lovely. Striking. She was every mother that ever was or ever will be. You'd know her if you saw her - she's your mother, too.

She stopped just in front of me, and the look of unutterable sorrow on her face brought tears to my eyes. I would have prostrated myself at her feet and begged forgiveness, if only I could move. I would have done anything to make her smile, this perfect imperfect stranger.

She opened her mouth, and I and the world waited to hear her.
~~~~~
Part three HERE.