I Pray I'm Not Awake

Phoebe

I've been very hopeful so far
Now for the first time I think we're going wrong
Hurry up and tell me this is all a dream
Or could we start again, please?

The humor went unnoticed and Phoebe felt admonished for it by Frey's words. She lightly bit her lip, eyes closing briefly. "Bred?" she said in almost a whisper, eyes opening to look into Frey's hypnotic gaze again. Her brows were furrowed slightly. She understood what they meant she thought, simply that people would change over time as generations were born and died, but that was an awfully cold word for it. It made her think of dogs and fancy cats, not people. Perhaps to a god that was all humans were – fancy cats.

But she didn't get to think on it long, the deity moving on. Meaningless. It was a shock to her system no matter how not unkindly it was spoken. But as Frey explained, she felt for a moment that perhaps she grasped at the tendrils of knowledge. "No use crying over spilled milk." she recited quietly. Her mind was reaching, stretching, trying to understand and hold onto what they revealed to her with earnestness. Her unmistakable humanity perhaps put some of it out of her reach, some might be terribly beyond her, but the visage that she knew as Frey could at least rely on her attempting with all her being to understand.

Knowledge replacing sorrow and comfort? Her mind toyed with the idea...but could it be so simple? Was anything ever so simple? Surely they couldn’t be wholly without meaning – there had to be a reason for them to exist, there had to be a reason they were felt so keenly and deeply and universally. Did not sorrow balance joy? Comfort balance anguish?

"Find harmony?" she asked quietly. She would believe it. Phoebe knew she was a creature of sincere but strong emotion. She dove in heart first, mind second. If the two did not go together, she couldn't really consider herself harmonious, the scaled weighing too far on one side. But her eyes widened as the world began to spin and change before her very eyes. The destruction of the place shaking her, but so soon it morphed. Life sprang forth from the ashes, as if a Phoenix of lore. Enraptured, her eyes followed the movements of the tiny creatures that now surrounded them. Something clicked, if only in part, in her mind. This was where life started. Little. Simple. Vulnerable. She had seen this before. Perhaps not seen it so small but...this was how life grew. She had seen babies born far too early, so small and seemingly misshapen that they were unrecognizable as life. Under better circumstances though, they would have grown into what any would recognize as an infant child…and then that child would grow into something barely recognizable as the vulnerable few pound infant they had come into the world as.

A gentle hand reached out towards the tiny beacons of life, wishing to hold them close. Is this what her baby had looked like, just a little, squiggly circle of life? Was this how they all started and simply grew so complex? Brown eyes, still bloodshot from shed tears, looked at it all with wide-eyed and pure fascination. But then, even as she thought it, they did grow. They morphed and changed and adapted - no, evolved - into trees and grass and oceans and sunlight and all that she knew as a world. She looked at it all because it was fascinating. That so many things – that everything – starting as but one little…thing (she had not the words to describe what she saw in full) and grew and changed and despite all the things that could go wrong these delicate, vulnerable little things persisted in the face of all logic or odds and became so much more! Tears welled in her eyes now, not from meaningless sorrow, but as a way of release; for so impossible was what she looked upon that the glory that it even was was simultaneously incomprehensible and utterly undeniable.

Her breath caught at Frey's final words. Love came from...Mort? The god of death? That alone would have been enough to shake the young midwife to her core, already so off kilter from everything she had been feeling and just witnessed. Perhaps that was why Frey revealed this all to her now, because while the mind and heart were vulnerable they were most malleable to change. Phoebe remained silent for a time. She did not know how long, simply staring at the world, letting Frey's words take root within her, still clinging to their presence. But, time did not exist here did it? Frey had said so themselves. Something at the back of her mind giggled at the absurdity of it; clinging to a diving being, whose very existence was beyond her comprehension, being the last shred of familiarity to which she was now grounding herself.

"I am...certain I do not understand it all." she said quietly. She would not make the mistake she had with Ludo, and think that she understood...and somehow she felt that what Frey showed her was far more complex than anything Ludo had tried to show her. But life, she knew, required...specific conditions to exist and grow. It required...harmony in a way. Just the right amount of this and that, and without any one it would not form. That was what her remedies were intended for, to aid a woman's body in creating those conditions as a child grew within, or to balance the properties within a man's system so that he could beget the seed of life. Frey clearly had a better grasp of exactly how that all worked, but the ghost of the concept was there. To add something to the system...to throw off the balance so now life had to literally catch up to it...

"Is...is that why we call it being lovesick?" she asked quietly, testing a thought. "Mort created love...before we were ready...before we had developed a balance for it?" Lovesick, crazy in love...was it really almost like an illness because it was beyond their full comprehension? To feel something that had nothing to match it, nothing to keep it harmonious with everything else. Love was powerful and irrational and…she could think of nothing its equal. And when the body’s systems lost their balance…illness took hold (as was her current understanding of medicine and health).

In a way it made a semblance of sense. She had loved her baby. Loved them without knowing them, loved them for no discernable reason – and it was a love like a well so deep there was no bottom to it, a love that was boundless, instantaneous, irrational, and like nothing she had ever experienced before. There was no equivalent. And when she knew they no longer existed, that they would not continue to grow because her body had not been ready, she had nothing to fall back on. There was no emotion or knowledge she possessed that could anchor and reign in that love, and so she replaced with the next most powerful thing she did possess – anger. Hatred. Loathing. Love and hate were very close, she had heard, but not quite equivalent. However much she hated herself for what had happened would never harmonize with how much she had loved the little squiggly circle she had carried. Did that mean her anger, like sorrow and comfort, were meaningless, because they did not accomplish the task of balancing the love she felt? And then there was her grief…which now she thought to be separate, a mourning for all that would not be in the absence of her child – she mourned never knowing what they would have looked like or who they would have been or the things they would have done and experienced, not their death, per se. It was not that the water had spilled, but that she did not know when she would ever have water to drink again or what the water she had had would have tasted like. Was it actually meaningless or the side effect of the lack of harmony within her? Or was it the knowledge that Frey said would help in the face of meaningless emotion?

Was she even close to understanding? Or was her logic so infantile it was laughable or insulting in the face of the divine?

She wanted to understand – she so desperately wanted to know and grow into something more, something better, something and someone whole. And what did it mean to be whole if not to have found inner harmony? Unanimity. Grace. Completion. Phoebe tilted her face up, looking for the familiar kaleidoscopic gaze of Frey, feeling shaken, shattered, rebuilt, and…hopeful in the face of all she did not understand. ”What must I do to achieve it?” she asked innocently, knowing Frey was unlikely to give her an answer, but instead a starting point and general path to follow at best. If something so little as a squiggly circle could grow into something as magnificent as a tree or an ocean or a person, perhaps she was not so small and insignificant as to achieve the unattainable. If a squiggly circle could be a world, certainly she could be harmonious.