Chapter 5.2 - Mastering Stone

“Claire, when are you going to put yourself together and go back to your life? I can’t think of any other thirty year olds who live with their grandparents,” her grandfather started abruptly, right in the middle of breakfast. His unexpected rebuke made the young woman, who was still trying to chase away the shadows of the night before, choke on her coffee.

“Leave it alone, Joseph,” Grandmother spoke softly, in a voice that sounded very sad. “It’s too late now. She knows.”

“You filled her head with your superstitious nonsense, even though I specifically asked you not to!”

“She has the right to know who she is.” 

“Who she is is our granddaughter, who had managed to live a perfectly normal life until you decided to muddle her brains with fallacy and delusion,” Grandfather became increasingly upset.

“You know the truth as well as I do,” Grandmother held her ground. “And if she had a perfectly normal life she wouldn’t be here now. You said it yourself, not many thirty year olds live with their grandparents. They called her back, there are no two ways about it.”

“No rational person can have a normal conversation with you! Are you even listening to yourself?”

Claire followed the heated argument like a tennis match, following the bouncing retorts with increasing excitement but completely detached from them emotionally, as if the whole thing was about somebody else’s life.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see movement in the shadows, in the dark greenery behind the house. The sky darkened suddenly with the expectation of rain. The feeling in the dream came back to her, the certainty that there were others watching this scene, others that had as much of a stake in it as the three people at the table and who were waiting anxiously for the conclusion of the argument. Through this strange feeling Claire stood perfectly still, like a marble statue, trying to quiet even her breath, to slow herself down to a much lower frequency in order to resonate with the denser realms of earth and stone. She found great peace in that state, and with it came an understanding, deeper than words, of the way the pieces of the world had come together to create shapes and forms. Simpler forms evolved into broader and broader organizing structures without effort to reach the complexity of a large cosmic symphony. 

The light dimmed around her and the colors became unsaturated; an eerie buzz quickened in her bones and turned into a slow rush, something higher than a sensory input but lower than an emotion, the feeling of stone. She wanted to wonder how much time had passed and if she looked weird, sitting frozen like that, but there was no time in this state, because there was no way to measure or keep track of it. All that could be perceived was the uninterrupted vibration that came from all around her and passed through her flesh and bones like current through a wire. In this continuous present nothingness and infinity blended into one to became everything there is.

A loud voice, which turned out to be her grandfather’s, brought her back to the much higher speed of reality so fast she got disoriented. Whatever her perception of time had been in her slowed down state, she noticed that no time had passed in real time at all, and she was still listening to the last words of the argument.

It’s one thing to theorize about the dilation of time and a completely different thing to experience it personally. It turns out that when applied to practical matters scientific concepts are generally terrifying.

“Have you even been listening?” her grandfather continued his expression of disapproval for Claire’s tentative demeanor, obsession with unhealthy pursuits and lack of direction.

“Yes, Grandfather,” she said, still floating in a dream. She got up from the table, smiling, and walked across the lawn sprinkled with violets towards the pond, like something inside it had summoned her there.

“What have I done wrong?” Grandfather asked rhetorically. “What have I missed, in all of my efforts, so that she would still end up cursed like this? Why did I toil all my life only to have my future taken from me again?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just stood up abruptly and walked into the house, slamming the door behind him.

Grandmother looked at Claire’s silhouette, projected on the quiet waters of the pond and surrounded by water lilies and tall cattails. There were flowers at her feet, which almost seemed to have emerged from her footsteps. Even the wind had slowed down to a gentler speed around the young woman’s body, to the speed of a caress. 

“This is a gift, Joseph,” Grandmother muttered almost unintelligibly. “We are the cursed ones.”