Eden

three

Eden was so beautiful I could never write it all down. Waking up at sunrise, as the orange-yellow hues drifted in through the slit in my ceiling. I slept on a cot padded with hay, and I shared the dusty top-floor with a couple other residents I never got to know too well and several small birds that would flutter in. I didn't mind it; I actually watched a bird with a red belly make a nest, bringing sticks into the rafters week by week. I watched her lay her eggs too, those plump blue things, and sit on them with a sharp, guarded look. I don't think she minded that I watched her, reclined back on my cot and laid still. I never told anyone I saw these babies hatching; more and more I began having these moments I wanted to hold to myself, keeping them tucked under my own heart. I didn't like when they were taken away from me - sharing them felt like I lost them.

Eden had many fruit trees, and the apples would blossom, filling the air with their sweet scent and filling the grounds with their falling pink petals. I loved the apple blossoms; and I loved picking veggies in the morning, my mind still waking up to the sun, dew still coating each tomato and cucumber; and I'd pull the carrots and radishes out from the earth, brushing my hands past their leaves that dripped with dew - and there's something so refreshing about morning. It's like the world remade itself in the night, cleansed itself and got ready to start anew.

Each morning in Eden, I would step outside the door to my room and I'd take in the vastness of the breathtaking scenery around me, and I'd pause and breathe in and feel the sunlight on my shoulders. Back home, I never took a moment to pause. To breathe. My first thought would always be what time it was, and how late it was, and it would be a never-ending string of thoughts from then on with no space to really feel the contents of my day between them. A squiggling mental business that I felt like I just stepped outside of. Left them at the gates of Eden, along with my shoes, and stepped into a brighter world.

Mornings were early and all of us, some twenty-odd of us, would gather on the porch and have a bland breakfast of boiled grains and chopped fruit. Sometimes mint tea, but never coffee, and I had a headache the first month there because I was highly dependent on coffee back in my world of late nights and early mornings and rushing from here to there meeting deadlines. The headache was good, Mara said; it was a detoxifying thing. Body getting rid of the evil stuff and readjusting to right.

At every meal, there was some kind of silent competition about who would eat the least; no one spoke it, but I could tell in their gazes and the way they appraised everyone's plate around them, measuring theirs up against each others', that this was the case. I was never a thin girl, try as I might (and I tried, most of my childhood was really a series of trying and shame), and I'll never forget when Dave moved his eyes over my figure and said he could tell I'd been eating fake foods from the fake modern world. And I agreed because I hated myself so much that anyone's confirmation of my own fears felt like truth; and I was grateful, even, that I'd landed somewhere they might be able to fix me. You have to understand that there was no such thing as disagreeing at Eden; these people knew the Truth, and if you were against it, you were only being defensive. It meant the modern world had left its heavy imprint on you, and that you had to work harder and harder to expunge it. Defensiveness was the devil climbing up your throat, so I became afraid of my own doubts. I stopped speaking them.

It's an odd thing, how this gets under your skin. Gets in your own mind until you're turned against yourself. Every time I couldn't do enough, be enough, believe enough, it was the mark of some failure and all I wanted to do - all I wanted to do my whole life - was succeed.

Dave was by far the most pious, and he made a big show of not eating every other day. Now, looking back, I'm not sure if that was possible or if he'd been sneaking food but, at the time, I very much believed it. You see, it was a general thought they held that if you were filled up enough with God you didn't need to be hungry, and those who were hungry all the time had something missing in their soul that food didn't reach, so they kept eating. I had an acute sense of something missing in myself, some big glaring pit I was about to fall into all the time, but I didn't know what it was. When they said it was the absence of God, when they said they knew how to fill it up, you can't imagine how much I wanted to believe it. I'd do anything to be filled up all the way - I'd do anything to not be made of tissue paper; to stand surely; to not stand on some crater always threatening to cave.