Blue Night Full

by Paulina Guerrero

To my mother:

We all existed each day and every hour, in the Blue Night. In patience, you sat in the dark, in the blue light, waiting for something to call you from the deep, cold winter knowing that you will never be able to reach it but wanting to understand its frightening beauty and cold, distant, light.

I know that you did it; you got up from the fire and opened the door, letting out all the warmth, and began walking towards the cold, walking towards that never-ending blue winter.

I know that you walked so far and so long and reached a secret place. I know that you tried to figure out how to stay in the secret place for a very, very, very long time, and that you really were tired of being in that little town, in the blue night, sitting by the candlelight, waiting.

I remember watching you walk out into the night. I remember how beautiful you looked. You were wrapped in many layers of clothing, but you didn’t have a hat on. Your dark hair was long and free and blowing in the wind. You looked at me over your shoulder and just said, “Go back to bed” and then kept walking.

I understand why you did it. I understand why you were called to the secret place. I feel its calling now, too. But I am scared. I am scared of what you went through when you were in the secret place. I am scared of how it changed you as I started to hear about your mythic story. I am scared of how it shaped you and plied you, as though you were a piece of iron wielded by a blacksmith, and the secret place struck you and shaped you — using power, heat, and will — into a shape that was completely different from what you once were. But I also want to be shaped, I want to be wielded, and I want to be struck. I want heat and power and will to change me. Can you tell me how to get there without dying?

You knew you had to go to the secret place finally to become what you always knew you were. You were tired of the season of false midnights. You were tired of being a mother, and you were tired, of course, of waiting. The wait would end, but it kept harboring in the distance, mocking you, and it never seemed to get any closer. It burned in your chest, the waiting. You had had enough. It was time to stop being underestimated.

You didn’t want to leave us behind, and you didn’t want to cause an uproar. So you left, in the middle of the night, You simply got up after staring at a candle for an eternity, and walked out into the snow.

In the secret place, you began to learn things. You learned things about the cold and snow and then about heat. You began to really see. Something happened to you that I will never understand, but I know it as a feeling that rippled through me when it happened to you. It felt terrible and beautiful, all at the same time. How can you believe that you were meant to be there in the secret place? Growing stronger, ever present, more awake, and more alive?

The secret place turned you into a creature both of and not of this earth, and you floated liminally, like an apparition, knowing that your destiny was there in that place and never in that little town. I started to hear stories about you. I wasn’t surprised by what you had become, but I was also frightened.

Where will you go next, once the secret place is done with you? Once it has finished scattering you and melting you and molding you into the perfect tool? Into the perfect weapon? Into the perfect apparition? What place will be able to hold everything that you have become?

I wish you knew that you didn’t find the secret place; it found you. It would have found you whether or not you left that night. It would have found you if you had decided to stay another night, or another thousand nights. Because you were never meant to just stay, staring at a candle, waiting.

How much longer will you continue in this way? How much longer will you keep thinking that there is more out there? Don’t you understand that the most powerful things in the world come to you, and not the other way around?

* * *

To my daughter:

You ask me these questions as if the answers will change you somehow. You are not meant to ask, and I don’t need to answer. But I will tell you my story. I will tell you where I was born, and why, and who I have become.

I was born in a small place in the north. The winter here and the ice and snow and of, course, the power of the blue nights show how much of me is in this place. We all belong to all of the places, but there are times when our souls rest in a place and know it as a true home. Know it as a place to build our soul and our next hundred lives. I am here, and I will visit you in your dreams.

I was born here because of my parents. There is no great story of royalty, or destiny, or future casting. My parents did what many humans do. They wanted to make a family to build and to continue.

You speak of all these questions, and I am afraid I don’t have many answers, but I have what you need.

I grew up in the snow. I grew up in the blue night. I felt called by the blue night like a lover and like a brother. The blue night was always singularly male and female, but when it called me, it called as a man.

That is not to say that the blue night was ever human. The blue night envelops you and stirs you and begs for forgiveness. It is brutal to live in uninterrupted midnights for several months of the year. But my people, your people, learned to live with the blue night because of his harshness, his beauty, and his promises.

We thrived in those blue nights. We played, we worked, we made love, and we built.

Why did I leave?

I left because what tied me to a life that never felt like it belonged to me cut its ties with me. Many years before I left, I had children. I had you all, but I never felt like a true mother. I sometimes felt I was watching myself from above, doing all the things that mothers do but never believing that I was doing them.

I stared at a candle night after night. I stared at a candle because my mother had told me once that if you miss someone, stare at a candle and you will be able to speak with them. You will be able to hear them, too. I stared at the candle night after night trying to listen.

On the night I left, I woke up feeling light and free and even content. It is a feeling that I almost never have.

That night I stared at the candle. I felt his soul, the soul of the blue night, lift up and up, and up and slip into the other world. I felt my own soul settle into my gut. The waiting was done. I looked at you children. I knew that I needed to leave all of you. That leaving you, the way I was now, was the most loving thing.

I saw in the flickering light of the candle, a doorway. I saw that it was a path to another place. I also felt its delicacy, that with a single puff of my breath, it would go out. So much of life is like that.

My resolve felt like a thousand layers of deep earth quenching my misgivings and anxieties. Those thousand layers settled and rooted into the base of my spine. I finally felt my shoulders soften. I got up, turned towards the door, opened it slowly and took a moment to look at the windy snow coming down. I did not take a hat, because I knew I wouldn’t be cold. I stepped out.

You awoke and padded out into the room and looked at me, framed by the door, my hair blowing in the wind. I took one last look at you and felt relief and, for the first time, unburdened by expectation, I could feel genuine, blossoming, gut-wrenching, beautiful love for you. I felt love for your tiny body, your sleepy face, and your wispy bedridden hair. I felt love for the person you were going to be. I felt so much love, that I thought it would envelop me and float me into the night sky. “Go back to bed,” I told you. And I turned around and began to walk. Your love for me, and my love for you, is what gave me strength to begin walking into the blue night.

* * *

I had been walking for three days when I started to feel different. Something about the snow crunching under my boots, and the wind whipping my hair and face, and the cold all around me no longer felt like things to be understood and tended to with coats, boots, and constant motion.

I did not know what I was going to become, I just knew that the iciness of the wind felt like comfort, it felt like a constant part of me like my breath. The wind and the snow and cold started to seep into me in a way that felt like they were enjoining and coalescing with the bones and structures of my body. I was suddenly of the wind, of the snow, of the cold. The weather and the surrounding place I was in was not a place where my body was in, rather it was a place that was simultaneously inside of me and I was spread all around it. I was merging with my surroundings in a way that felt like a million snowflakes pushed themselves inside my organs, my brains, and my heart and then burst them apart.

Actually, I didn’t feel that way, it was happening. The snow was inside my body. I felt every singular preciousness and uniqueness of those snowflakes, inside of me, and knew that I had arrived to the secret place. The snowflakes kept pushing from inside my body and then... my body broke apart into a thousand fragments enjoining the snow. I was scattered everywhere, blowing with the wind, a part of the magic that causes snow to fall softly and gently.

The secret place was a place that had stirred inside of me since the beginning. I knew that we would someday become one. I had arrived here and the transformation was happening.

I knew that the blueness of the night, with the sun constantly hedging at the horizon, would help me circumnavigate this new form. I knew that I was becoming something that was not human, but singularly here, and dwelling in this place. My consciousness was finally free of my body entirely, and I started to feel my self slip away. My consciousness was nothing but an ethereal presence there.

Yet, in a moment, I recognized that I still had a center. In that center, in that seat, a light, a flame began to grow.

As this flame began to grow, I felt or sensed moisture and earth rise up from the ground and begin to take shape. It began to morph and rise and shape itself into what I can only presume as my new body. My thousand broken parts began to come home to this shape, to this body. My thousand broken parts scattered into the snow started to come home into my body to help it take shape. Organs formed, bones clayed themselves, marrow filled the insides, sinew merged into skeleton, muscles attached to joints, my heart began to pump fresh, dark, life throughout every ounce of me. I still had no skin, but I could open my eyes. The wind, the snow, the cold, whipped through my skinless body. I began to scream. I screamed because I was cold, I screamed because everything suddenly hurt and whipped and was ripping through me all at the same time, all at once. I screamed because I was so, so angry.

I screamed

I screamed myself into silence. My vocal cords stopped being able to produce sound. I had screamed myself silent, and my throat felt like I had cut it apart.

I started weeping. I wept in the cold; freezing, crouching, burning, silently.

I wept

I wept and then, exhausted, I collapsed.

I looked at my hands. New skin had formed. I was no longer skinless; new skin had formed all over my body.

I looked all around me. The snow had stopped falling and everything was quiet. The colors of the sky were in a spectrum of myriads of blues showing the path of the hedged-horizoned sun.

It was not that my pain was gone but that it had receded into the background like a soft ache that occasionally needed tending to.

I no longer needed the blue night, the cold, and the snow. I no longer needed to hold everything that I had carried here. It had burned away in the heat, in the snow, in the searing cold. I felt sharp and clean like a knife but also soft and pliable like fresh earth for gardening. This is what it feels like to be whole.

My new skin felt tender and sensitive and resilient. I turned south and began to walk.

I have told you all that I am willing to share with you, daughter. I have told you the most important parts. My myth reached your ears and you wanted to know the truth or a truth. I know that I called to you to understand this story so that you can carry it with you.

This is not to explain any of my actions, because I do not feel that I need to do so, but so that you can understand who you are and why you are and the fire that lives inside you. You also have a center, and you also have a light, and I hope that you know now why it is there.

Goodbye.

Proceed to Challenge 945...