Nothing! Nothing would surely come to a man so alone and still! But he would not be caught waiting, for he knew his life would sustain itself regardless; and what could the world beyond his own soul give him, really? Nothing, nothing but blackness all around, with the rain only finding him to be heard.

And he did hear it, he listened, and the constant pitter-patter from the endless black was a comfort: movement came to find the man in stillness, it always did, though he wanted more than to absorb without recognition.

What an unbearable cycle it could be! The man who lived alone knew he was seen, and could not lose himself to bitterness, but somewhere deeper, below his own personal selfhood, he knew that his future, the future, could not bloom without something breaking through from the void.

But anger was behind him now. Whatever rage had tightened in his chest and shoulders over time was now gone, loosened in the throes of a recent cosmic demand. He would not get the rage back, it could only be transfigured as movement, like the rain, or perhaps something more. After the laying down of his law, private and sovereign, the man had settled into an indestructible calm. He was serious with knowing, and this seriousness slowed his movements further.

There was a knock at the front door. The man felt a sudden nausea as the weight of his stomach rose, then dropped back down, down into his legs. He was caught, pulled tight between the inner and outer, his attention drifting inevitably towards the door while the nausea trapped him in himself. He strode slowly, with a quick heart, through the front room, drawing the long curtain and stepping into the chilled, liminal air of the vestibule. The two draughty little worn-out windows either side of him gave nothing, no promise, only blackness and rain. He stood a while longer in that in-between space, and there was no further knock. Whatever waited, waited patiently in that wet darkness.

The man opened the door to the woman who waited. She stood on flat feet against the dark behind her, the secret dredged from the cosmic lake. She stared at the man who lived alone with eyes all desperation and fear; those black implosive eyes were already sucking in the light of the man’s quiet home, and yet waiting still, as they always had done. The man looked back at the woman and knew what she was, and what she was not. He saw her and he recognised her, through the darkness and the reaching and the pathetic, helpless exterior of the rained on phantom, aching at his front door. He smiled.

“You called to me,” the woman said quietly. “I waited, and I waited, then I heard your call.” Her voice was unsure but her posture was certain. She seemed to the man to stand in her own, ancient, untouched presence. “You called to me,” she said again, again from that same ancient place.

“Would you like to come in?” smiled the man calmly.

When the woman stepped inside the man’s home, her soul stopped waiting, and settled instead into the matter of a place for the first time. She moved slowly, on wet, muddy feet, beyond the man and into the centre of the cramped living room. She could not be conscious of herself, of her body in the room, not yet, for all her awareness was on the man.

He fumbled at the front door, wrestling it shut from inside the draughty entrance. He then appeared, aware of himself before the woman, and smiled again.

“When it rains, the wood swells,” he said.

But the woman said nothing. She couldn’t, not while she was so constantly aware of him. She turned her back, pointing those dark eyes at the last glowing embers of the fireplace. The man closed the second door and drew the curtain, sealing off the liminal and securing them in the warmth and stillness. He noticed the trail of mud on the carpet behind the woman and said nothing. She faced him again, sensing him motionless by the curtain.

“Why did you call to me?” she asked, her voice soft and apologetic.

“I spoke into the darkness and made a demand,” said the man.

“What was your demand?” asked the girl, shrunken slightly. Through her dark eyes, the man was suddenly terrifying.

“That I be recognised,” said the man.

He watched her shrink more, hiding behind her sorrow and self-pity. The girl, this wound, was not who he recognised beneath. He stepped towards her, his own fear rising in some primal anticipation, as if he were stepping towards his own death and judgement. His body clenched and he felt himself small, lacking in all presence, but his heart could only soften, almost to match the girl, who, in her own fear, seemed to dwarf him. No, said the man’s fragile, open heart, No, it is enough to live through one death! It is enough!

“There is a darkness about you,” he admitted reluctantly. “You have brought darkness into my home.”

“No!” cried the helpless, wounded girl. “No, I waited for you: the world is dark, it is dark and dead and awful! I waited for you and you called to me and I came to you!”

The man saw the recognition, he saw it plainly in the morbid need of the girl’s gaze. Her wet hair clung to her face and her sloped, beaten shoulders were heavy with that same need. This girl, she was all darkness and sorrow and need! The man grew smaller again in himself, finally recognised in full. Could he not escape his own necessity?! Must he really stand tall to meet this girl, this wound, when he was living the very smallness the cowardly world hid from?! Darkness could only hide in itself so long. Now it stood before him, witnessed, yet hoping to hide still.

“I know you,” said the man at last. “I know you and what you have brought with you. But you are not yet standing before me as yourself. I see the darkness; I do not see you.”

“I have brought only myself, nothing else!” implored the girl: her dark, wet eyes straining open, as if to swallow him.

The man stepped aside, and gestured to the mud on the carpet. The girl froze, trapped in herself. She had no thoughts, only looked back at the man with frozen eyes, which had now lost their wetness. She was blank, and for a moment unwounded: a featureless obstinacy was left in the absence of fear and fight. She then flinched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, going to move past the man. “I came because I was called. I will clean it.”

Against himself and his inner smallness, the man smiled, and placed a hand on the girl’s arm. She stopped, suddenly calm and soothed without explanation. She wanted more of his touch and nothing else, but she could not stand and be witnessed any longer. She did nothing.

“The mud is just mud,” the man then decreed. “It points to you and you are here now.” As he spoke she did not move; she would not go, for she had been called to, and she had already waited. “The darkness you have brought with you-”

“I have brought no darkness!”

“…the darkness you have brought with you is not yours. It is mine.”

They both stood in the quiet aftermath of his utterance. The rain had not stopped. What was left of the measly fire was glowing dimmer and dimmer, offering the last of its warmth to the girl; and she could feel it, too, spending itself on her as she lingered, a burden to her own moment of arrival.

What could he mean: it was his? No, this man before her was light! He was light and warmth and stillness, and he could only glow with that warmth, low and persistent and still… he was the warm glow in the darkness. He could only be light! And she, what was she? She belonged in that light, in his light, dwelling with him in stillness.

But he terrified her, even in his warmth. And why would he if not for the darkness he had accused her of bringing? Darkness alone feared light, though it was in the greatest need-and what, this darkness too was his? No! He had said it himself: she alone had brought the darkness in. Yes, it could only have been her, and so how could it not be hers?

“I did bring you this darkness,” she said.

The man nodded.

“But what I have brought you is not apart from myself,” she continued. “I came from the world, where I waited for your call, your light and stillness, and now I have come to you as the world itself. I am not apart from it and it cannot be yours.”

The man wanted this to be true. It would free him of the burden and he could banish the darkness again. But it was not true, and he could never be free while parts of himself remained cast out, scattered, hidden.

“It is mine,” he repeated, trembling.

“No! It cannot be yours!” screamed the girl, who was at war with herself. “No! You have not felt the warmth of your touch, you have not stepped inside your walls from the dark! I alone am the darkness, it cannot be you! My heart, it is not like yours, it sits cold and black in my chest. Hope alone cannot keep out hate, and my heart is full! I waited and I waited for your call in that darkness, and my hope could only fuel itself on hatred! I am what is cold and bloodless, and all darkness is mine, it is mine! I could only feel my heart in the world, living each deathly moment on hatred and hope, a heart that was coal and nothing more!”

That man’s soul recoiled. He hated the girl and wanted her gone. She had all of his power, did she not? This girl had siphoned him, and so she stood there with all her drama and pain and made him nothing! He was nothing, he did not exist, he could not feel his own presence. He was the very fact of insignificance, crushed by all the pain and aching, needful presence, the true conditions of reality laid bare before a main of nothingness.

Yet there still, beneath the dark, wounded girl, was the true life he recognised, individual and waiting still, to bloom and be full. He stepped towards her again, and all distance was closed. He could not turn her away.

“Your heart is mine,” he said. “But you belong to yourself.” He placed both hands on her shoulders, and smiled. “The mud is the earth, it belongs to itself. You are a woman, and you belong to yourself. You must let me take back what is mine, and was never yours.”

The woman softened, and submitted. She followed the man as he lowered himself to the floor, sitting cross-legged on the old carpet by the hearth. She knelt, unable to match the childlike simplicity of the man, who controlled the space even with his slumped, boyish posture and unnerving openness. So she knelt, her back stiff and feminine, ready. For a moment, the man hesitated, struck by the beauty of the woman of darkness, the one who had waited. How radiant, how powerful she was! Even as she carried the eternal wound of separation and had taken it as her own! This was his deepest terror, that he, the man who lived alone, unrecognised, might sit before darkness and beauty itself, and redeem it from his position of nothingness. He felt so small. How unworthy he was!

Suddenly, it was the woman who could no longer bear her own inadequacy. She was too visible, too seen! And this man, sitting so open, so quiet, was he not the infinite stretched to its limit?!

“Give me your hands,” he said, and the woman obeyed, turning herself over to him.

The man took her pale hands in his and looked at them. He did as only he knew how to do, and witnessed. His heart began to ache and swell with his own darkness returning. It screamed in his chest, begging his soul to reject the infecting blackness; but that same heart was the very organ of his divinity, and there was no internal war, only necessity. The stillness in his heart spoke calmly through the pain, No, these hands are alive, they are innocent! This was fact.

The woman’s once dark eyes had fallen shut. All memories of the world, of her hope and hatred, were fading. Hope, what is hope? said her heart, returning to its primordial state. Pure. No, there is no hope, spoke her heart, There is only life, and life is certain!

The two beings, man and woman, had returned to themselves at the hearth, and each had lost awareness of the other. The woman’s body fell first, softly carrying her to lie flat on the carpet, asleep. The man, as was his nature, remained one moment more, and took one last glance at the angel breathing contentedly on the floor, embodied and warm. Then, finally, he was taken by his own frailty and let the darkness, and the endless rain, press close to the last glowing embers of his own light, to be witnessed.

III

In the early hours of the following morning, the woman rose. The rain continued on from the night before, only gentler and somewhat soothing. A tentative daylight was already beginning to breathe renewed life into the room, which itself felt smaller to the woman, smaller in presence and responsibility, yet more spacious.

Having risen in her own stillness, the woman then turned to see the man lying depleted with a weakened breath. She moved a calm, certain hand to his forehead, which was dull and cold, and the panic pressed through her body with that same calm and certainty.

“You must stay,” she asserted, and she was immovable on the fact.

Remarkably, the fire had not yet died, and the woman set about rekindling. She was patient with the fire, in line with her original virtue, and of course it responded quickly to her slowness and conviction. Soon it roared, and the cool air around the man began to thicken. The woman removed a thin woollen blanket from the solitary armchair, as well as one of the neatly placed sofa cushions, and house her first true companion in care. She left him to warm in peace, doubtless about his return.

Her first task as a woman alone with herself, residing in a stillness that really was a permanent loving hold, was to venture further into the little cottage at the centre of all things. She passed silently through the sparse little dining space, where the bluish light of the new day only pooled in from the pleasant archway that led to the kitchen. She followed it, tracing a finger over the oak table, which stood practically on spindly legs, pressed firm into the laminate flooring, and she grasped one of the chairs, curling her fingers through the spokes and grounding herself in the house fully.

Gliding on, underneath the arch and feeling a mixture of the regal and the domestic, she found herself resting by the sink. There was the saucepan, lying dry on the side, and there was a woman, alive and true, recognising the beauty of the world as it too rested in stillness, permitted to be itself without ache! Her eyes, bright and new, floated over the cream cabinets, with their delightful little wooden knobs and perfect ever-presentness, and over the hanging cups and mugs, little vessels of unassuming whites and sky-blues, and lastly, those grateful eyes stared right through the kitchen doors and into the greater world outside. Rich green ivy rested on the glass, crisp and dark and pure, and cradling the daylight in its leaves. A subtle mist hovered over the grass, while the ground itself was wet and fertile. For once, for the first time, the woman felt that she was home. Yes, things were expansive, and she belonged in the world at large, for she was home!

With her heart full in this way, she thought of the daylight, still weak, and then of the man who had brought her home. Tears came to her, contained, as she felt something indescribable, standing there in the home that was such an ordinary cottage, and so humbly, quietly kept.

“What kind of man does that?” she asked herself, and it was final, an unanswerable question of pure recognition.

She decided to prepare some tea for the man, leaving the water to boil and exploring more of the house as she waited. The upstairs was off-limits for now, or so she felt in her soul. But she did enter the small bathroom, which, like the rest of the home, had a holy kind of order to it, in the neat placement of soaps and carefully folded towels. The same stillness and daylight was there too, and when the woman was brought face to face with herself in the mirror, she saw a body finally ignited by its own spirit.

A sudden joyful compulsion took her back into the kitchen, where she unlocked the doors and gracefully descended barefoot 0n to the damp patio. Oh, the garden was such a delight! What a modest, teeming little world of dripping rose petals and dainty cobwebs laden with moisture! She stood tall, innocent without risk: she was finally incorruptible, like the new shoots of grass, even as they stood in the wet soil, roots at one with the earth.

The rain had stopped. A thin mist lingered around her ankles, gradually dissipating under the rising sun. Something caught the woman’s eye. In the back corner of the garden, sitting in its own, ceremoniously cleared space by the ageing fence, was a fig tree. Around the base, lying finished on the soil, were several shrivelled leaves. The woman crept across the patch of dewy grass to inspect the tree, finding promising green tips already poking through the ends. She smiled.

The water was boiled. The woman prepared one small cup of fruit tea for the man and found him sitting up by the fire, silent. They didn’t look at each other at first. The woman set the tea down on the coffee table next to him, making use of a perfectly straight coaster. Then, reminded of the mud on the carpet, she fetched a brush and cleared away the dried residue of the night before without guilt or fuss. The man watched her with unsure eyes, though the usual stillness remained in his heart. He was still there. He had not gone. He would continue.

As the man gentle began to sip his tea by the fire, the woman settled further and further into the world’s stillness, which could now not be undone. She pottered from room to room, saying nothing, while it started to dawn on the man properly that he too, now belonged to himself, and was recognised.

Eventually, the man came to his feet, returned the blanket and cushion to their original places, and reclined into his armchair, sipping the last of his tea. The woman sat happily on the small sofa facing him, and there was silence. In the silence, that ripe stillness, the woman felt a simple joy rise up in her to overflow. She broke the silence with her abundance:

“I really like the fig tree in the garden,” she said.

The man waited, bracing for a burden that didn’t come, for it had already been carried, set down, completed. A responsive joy of his own bubbled up and escaped him:

“It grew too big for its pot,” he said. “I had to put it in the ground. I wasn’t sure whether it would take to the soil.”

“It has,” smiled the woman. “It’s beautiful.”

IV

The new world began quietly, and it began with a man and a woman living together in stillness. Their home blossomed in spirit and flesh, resolving eternal conflict through play. Variety was born again, sprouting from the soil of time reclaimed, and stretching out towards a grateful sun, finally recognised. It was good, irrefutably: a union had taken place, and it was fixed.