Whew. I wrote these stories, and true to Taurus, I did not post them "on time" but on the stories' own time. As I write this, Gemini season is ending.
This year, I am writing a short science-fiction/fantasy story for the Sun's journey through every 10 degrees of each tropical zodiac sign. Below is a story for Taurus 3, the third decan of the fixed earth sign. In the tradition that I practice, this decan corresponds with the planet Saturn, and with the Seven of Pentacles tarot card. If you would like to know more about the heart of this project, you can read more here.
This story will likely be more enjoyable if you've read the Taurus 1 story from this story cycle. Here's the link to that. If you like, you can read Taurus 2, too, but I don't think that one is necessary to understand the worldbuilding premise behind this final Door/Keeper tale.
I am thankful for the below influences, which gave shape and inspiration to my time spent with this:
Stephanie Pui-Mun Law's Seven of Pentacles
THE ARTIST'S WAY by Julia Cameron
The Good Place--Season 4, Episode 13--"Chapter 52: Whenever You're Ready"
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"I Will Not Face the Void of Love Alone"
by Lois Mei-en Kwa
Dear Door,
It is no longer the cries for help that keep me awake at night, but the quiet.
I don't even sleep, any longer. But you know what I mean.
This truth scares me more than the thought of walking away from this afterlife, which, by this point, feels like all I have ever known. It frightens me that I have become more comfortable with the distress of witnessing unrelenting waves of mass crises than with basic stillness. I finally realized this. I immediately sat down to write to you. I know that what follows will not be much of a surprise to you, but I feel strongly that I owe you--I owe us--the act of writing it down.
Can you believe that this is my first letter to you? In seven millenia, I have not used the Query Void once! Give or take a millenia, I suppose, to acknowledge the time we spent doing this work before we engineered the Void. Still. My first time writing in. Wow. This, despite needing (and receiving) more assistance from you than probably any other soul in this afterworld.
Last night, you asked for a list of things I would love to do, if only I were allowed to do them. I dodged the question, turned back to the Void, and reached back into its cosmic bowels to catch up on a filing project regarding the previous Saturn cycle's worth of requests for spiritual exfoliation.
I could not rest at all last night until I made the stupid list. Here it is:
- If I were allowed to do so, I would travel through the afterworld with no concrete plans to return. Every time I chose my next destination, I would do so based on where I most wanted to go next, not on where I thought I should go next.
- I would visit flower gardens that were tended by other souls, and give as many embarrassing compliments to the gardeners as I am metaphysically capable of doing.
- I would get a tattoo.
- I would start a zine for social service workers.
- I would join a tai chi club.
- I would reach a metric ton of romance novels and keep a journal of my opinions of them.
- I would plant a garden of my own. I would fill it with particular flowers, dramatic flowers, difficult flowers. Flowers that demand to be tended like mad before they bloom like a many-headed queen you would fall to your knees in the dirt for, get your hands dirty for. I would plant wildflowers that demand the freedom to grow without restraint.
Do you remember the day we met? I was stomping through the ethermeadow. I moved as aggressively as possible because I was scared out of my mind, in part because I was newly deceased, but mostly because I was finally, I thought, free. I had become a servant at the age of 9 and I died in the service of my assigned clerk before I turned 30. I woke up in the Welcome Room in the basement of Human Resources and was immediately greeted by a different clerk, a new, frightening one, being as they were a person who smiled and offered me their service without demanding any in return.
I snatched the clothes they offered and ran naked out of the room, into the infinity stairwell (designed after that Escher print--impressive in hindsight, terrifying in reality--to whoever was responsible for that latest round of architectural renovation-work, you're not as funny as you think you are), and out into the dreamy afterworld undaylight.
Then I started screaming. The screaming only stopped when the stomping began. I was going nowhere, but pretty quickly, and once I'd made my way through the first mile of ethermeadow, I literally walked right into you.
i gawked at the wooden door standing upright and open in the middle of the tall grasses. You had just portaled in a few minutes ago and sent your notification of availability to the nearby villages and communes and nodes. Your Querents had yet to arrive. You asked me politely what I needed help with, and so of course I burst into tears, completely overwhelmed. Back then, you were even more uncomfortable with direct contact with extreme human emotion than you are now, and your line of questioning promptly shifted from asking what you could do for me to asking what you could do to get me to calm the fuck down.
The first Querents floating our way, wading through the tall, pink ethergrass. Already, they were forming a line.
"Just give me something to do," I blurted out.
And from that day on, I have been Keeper, and you have been Door.
Right away, there was the alien safety of knowing that I could leave anytime I wanted to, and there was the comforting audacity of my choosing to stay. I experimented with enjoying how it felt to have the freedom to stay. I never had to hold out my hands and accept this freedom from any supposedly benevolent authority. I never had to say Thank you to anyone for deigning to grant me my basic human rights. After some time, i was able to feel how angry I was that I had to enter an entirely new world--the afterlife, no less--in order to finally be treated like I had choices.
I made this choice daily for seven thousand years.
But somewhere along the way, it has stopped feeling like a choice, and more like an expectation.
From the outside, it probably doesn't look like this should be the case. Lately, our little world has been running almost perfectly. Our compassion management system is sustainable, self-maintaining, and vibrant with helpfulness and relational connectivity. Every day, we serve others, and we serve them with genuine joy in our hearts (or whatever passes for a heart with you. If that's even a transferrable analogy.) All is well.
So why am I unhappy? Though I doubt this comes as a surprise--you did not ask me for the above list for fun--I must note to myself as well as to you that I am unhappy enough to admit these feelings to you. That is decidedly not how I roll.
At first, I told myself that I was filled with concern over the welfare of our work: that the better things go for us, the more I fear all that could go wrong. "I am merely concerned--for our Querents, of course, not for myself!"
And while it is true that this anxiety seizes my attention from time to time, it is just as true that I am very much aware of how adaptive, resourceful, and creative our work is--not despite, but because of the sheer tonnage of shit that has gone wrong over the millenia. Together, we have encountered, caused, and recovered from failures minor as well as catastrophic, emergent as well as slow-building. Together, despite the truly ridiculous scope of barriers and systemic problems that compromised our best intentions and efforts, we have--always, always!--discovered and sought and generated brand new ways to provide aid to souls in need.
No. The real crisis hides like a thorn in my heart.
I am unhappy because I am ready to walk away from our work, and some part of me believes that our work could not possibly continue if I left you.
And even that--that is not exactly right. Some part of me believes that I could not go on if I walked away from you. Some part of me believes that the sole condition of my spiritual well-being is contained within our relationship, and in the official form it currently takes.
There is no question to me that no matter what you did, or where you did it, or why, you will always be Door to me. However, if I were to no longer work with you, I do not really feel that I would still be Keeper to myself. Perhaps this is why--although I know we could part ways for seventy years and your first greeting upon seeing me again would be so deadpan, so impolite, that I would have no doubt at all that you still loved me--although I know in the very marrow of my soul that there will always be a place for me in your afterworld--I dread the day you find a new human soul with whom to do this work.
Perhaps this is why, the other day, you said--apropos of what I thought was definitely, totally, absolutely nothing--"You know, there will always be a place for you here. In any shape, any form, any future. I'm just saying this for the record."
Did I even bother to respond to you, or did I turn away, bury myself back in the work to disguise my sadness?
Door, I fear that I am replaceable, and nothing more than useful. I fear that if I do not make myself as extremely helpful as possible to as many souls as possible, that I might as well not exist at all. I fear that if I release myself from this expectation, that I might float away--and that you would merely watch me go. I fear that I would disappear and never again find myself journeying through a field of etherflowers, never again encounter another being who, despite immediately seeing the full extent of my broken spirit and my hysterically snotty face, is willing to offer me fellowship and friendship.
Despite the fact that our sacred work is no longer the work of my heart, I am afraid to put down my tools. I am afraid of the sacred work of finding out what on earth happens next.
My fear brightens the longer I dare to face it, like a sun, like a moon, like a star. I pray that following it brings me closer to you in spirit, even as it takes me away from you in function.
Door, it is time for me to go. I do not know how to go--only that I must. Perhaps one reason I waited so long to write this letter is because I thought I could not inform you of my leaving while having no unearthly clue to where I will go.
Perhaps that is a portion of the help I ask you for in this letter. Perhaps you might be willing to sit with me when our work is done for the day, and talk with me about what happens next for both of us. I know that my leaving will change much at first, and I know that not much will change, in the vast view of things. You will find a new Keeper. You will find a new way--again--of being in the world in a way that supports and cares for as many souls as possible. You will change the system completely, because this is what is necessary to be in the world in the aforementioned way. You will make a new way, which has always been your way. And I will change, too. I will make a new way, too. I will find my new name.
Writing this, my heart has deepened and lightened, both. I have raised my head from this letter and the Void into which I will soon release its pages. Out in the field, I can see the line of souls unwinding before us like a path I now feel nothing but wonder for having traveled with you at all.
Look, Door, a new Querent! This one took a very long time to speak their heart. I think they knew you would behold their letter with exactly as much love as you have beheld each letter than came before it. They feel so much better to have become one among many.
Talk more soon, with love, and a thankful heart,
--Keeper
THE END
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