The Sacred Ache

The Descent: A short work of fiction on grief, longing, and mythos

Today I began my four-week journey with Segovia Amil’s new ebook, The Sacred Ache. Which is essentially a guide for creatives in “Transforming suffering into art.” -Segovia Amil.

For close to a decade now, Amil’s work has been deeply inspiring to me. When I saw she had released this new book, I instantly purchased it, not realizing until I read the foreword how much I needed it.

So we begin…

The descent. The dance of souls. The echo of lifetimes.

I had that dream again.

Wandering in a barren wasteland. Time seemed to stretch like a rubber band into eternity.

Heavy purple clouds hung low in the sky, tumbling over the hills toward the bone-dry valley like a stampede of wild horses. The thunder clapped like hoofbeats, and the strikes of lightning cracked like whips.

Nothing grows here.

Water deprivation marred the Earth's skin, leaving it scorched and blackened. Carcasses scattered the land in their final pose of surrender–life left to wander in search of something it would never find–until its body gave out, its last hope lingering on its dying breath.

There under the skeleton of a tree, bent by the howling winds, sat a single rose in vibrant color.

The rose’s petals were garnet red and soft like velvet. Its stem and leaves were a green you only see in spring, and the thorns were sharp like knives, ready to claim an offering from the hand who dared to pluck something precious and keep it for their own.

I was gathering something, but I’d forgotten what. That had begun to happen often.

The forgetting.

But this rose snapped something inside of me, zapped me into the presence of remembering.

I was alone.

My eyes had adjusted to the shadows, but they ached for the sun.

As if the skies were answering my prayer, the thunder roared overhead, and the lightning struck the tree.

Panic blinked awake from its slumber; an ancient god, imprisoned and rattling against my ribcage.

The rose!

The earth under my feet quivered as if fate had caressed it.

I collapsed beside the remains of an animal as the earth yawned open. Dust filled my lungs, and the land crumbled in an invitation—death's embrace.

The burning tree fell into the abyss like a torch illuminating the stairway down.

Down.

        Down.

The rose landed like an offering from a lover on the first step into the descent.

The air was damp, promising rain after a lifetime of drought.

If I stayed,

I’d drown.

So I took a step.

I picked up the rose. My finger pricked on the thorns. I hissed. In pain or pleasure that I could still feel something, I don’t know, but I gripped the stem harder.

Fat drops of my blood landed on the stairs as I took them one at a time.

Down.

          Down.

                    Down.

And then it’s him.

A phantom in exquisite clarity, surrounded by shadow.

Real only in the way a person in dreams can be real; mythic–symbolic. There to be intellectualized but never held in the way every atom of me demands.

My mind has no control over my heart or my body, and I’m furious when my feet step toward him.

He was my curse.

Taunting me.

Five paces ahead.

Haunting me.

Guiding me.

He never speaks.

Never smiles.

He just waits.

When I step. He steps.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask him; a question from a thousand lifetimes of almost. The words are on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t fully form them.

I knew then that if I asked, he wouldn’t answer.

He’s not really there or here or anywhere.

He never is.

Coward.

My heart ached with the ferocity of a hungry tiger, and the tears that spilled out of my eyes were blood red. As if the pain in my soul was trying to carve its way out of me.

I surprised even myself.

How could I still have tears after all this time?

What beast inside of me burned eternally with this anguish?

Fate, in its cruelty or wisdom—I can’t decide–dangled him like a carrot on a string in front of my starving body.

I was losing myself in the wandering, but at least I was fine.

Now that I remember him, I feel an eternal exhaustion–restless–like the ocean.

Enraged that I have to carry the weight of this ghost alone.

Again.

Something that feels like fire stirs and coils in my belly like a snake.

He was better felt than seen.

Why does he get to live blissfully unaware of the scars he ripped open within me and left me here to bleed with?

What is the balance?

Is he haunted by the unknowing the way I am haunted by the knowing?

How can two people run in opposite directions and still collide with one another?

He was a dreamscape, a shadow. Disorienting. Destabilizing, like something you carry back to your waking life that you weren’t supposed to.

Harrowing.

Like something that was supposed to stay buried.

An achingly gorgeous paralysis demon that terrorizes you in the liminal in-between.

His story is one I know too well. He retreats into the illusion of his demons to avoid the pain of healing. He’s the master in the mask, protecting his truth at its core; the nightmare weaver who only ever wanted to make dreams softly, quietly.

In that moment, I know we both burn fiercely.

I am tortured by the absence of holding, but he is tortured by the desire to be held, and in this way we are equals in our grief.

My lungs filled with rose and smoke.

I looked down at my shaking hands.

Somewhere along the descent, petals began pouring out of my gaping wounds.

There’s a flicker of something real that passed between this phantom and me. As if for just a moment, something reached him beyond the veils.

But I’m not a fool.

Or maybe I am.

Because, damn it, if I don’t feel that treacherous spark of hope.

I have learned nothing; it seems.

He stopped in front of a stone wall, and I know.

Delicate petals cover the ground at my feet now.

The rose I once held combusted but didn’t burn me as I tossed it at the base of the wall in a silent offering.

Stone ground against itself and revealed the portal to the underworld.

I know it like I know my name.

My eyes stung as they adjusted to the light spilling through the threshold.

He stood so close then, if I tried hard enough I could convince myself I felt his breath on my lips.

Staring down at me, his eyes seemed to plead for me to save him.

I stepped back.

I fought the urge to reach for him.

I knew if I did, he’d disappear. So I stood taller and stared back because it's better than nothing, but also because I will not survive watching him disappear one more time.

I knew how that story went.

I’d lived it thousands and thousands of lifetimes.

They came back to me biblically.

I can only survive if I leave first.

So I whispered the words on my dry and cracked lips. They grated against my raw throat like sandpaper; the result of being silent for too long.

I choke,

I still

I love

“Thank you.”

Then, I turned away.

I stepped over the embers of the rose.

I didn’t look back.

I walked.

Into the light of the underworld, I walked.

Bathed in gold and lush in its eternal spring.

My agony thawed into something softer. My darkness sighed in relief. My tattered cloak fell away.

I am alive again.

But the ember of that ache burned deep, like a promise between my ribs.

It never forgets him.

So I walked.

I kept walking because there’s nothing else to do but carry on.

-J.M. Shaffer