SILK JOURNEY

When you left, the sun did not shine for three days. On the radio, they said there had been an extraordinary solar eclipse. The reason astonished all the physicists and explorers of the cosmos. The moon stopped its lonely orbit around the Earth and remained motionless for three days. This caused a series of cosmic cataclysms with unpredictable consequences.

The moon did not want the sun to outshine your departure. After three days of sorrow and universal confusion, the sun rose again above all the gardens, parks, forests, seas and oceans. It illuminated the whole Earth with its light. It warmed every cold heart. But the sun did not rise above my house, and the trees in my garden remained sunk in darkness.

When you left, my only companion was the lonely moon, which rose every night above my garden, became caught among the branches of one of the trees, and remained there until morning like a faithful guardian.

When you left, the clouds travelled around the Earth, gathering the tears of all the lonely people. Then they poured tonnes of tears upon the ground in the form of rain. The rain fell with the force of the Biblical Flood and left lasting traces in the form of tear-filled eyes.

When you left, you told me to wait for you. You told me to wait for you in this life and in every other. You said that you were not ready yet and that you suffered greatly watching me flutter freely around you. You said that ours would not be an equal union—between a slave and a free bird. You told me that in the next life you would belong to me.

I told you that I was no longer free. And that meant we were both slaves, which made us equal. I told you that our love made us equal, but you said it was not enough. You said that you had to leave so that one day you could return, because ours was an unfinished story that had not yet decided how it wished to end.

I promised that I would preserve my body for that one day. And I waited for you through countless days and even longer, lonelier nights. I waited while all the other stories around me quickly reached their endings. I waited like the faithful widow of an unrealised love story, waiting for its main character to return and write the final chapter. I waited while other leading characters wanted me to become the heroine of their own stories.

They even promised a rapid development of our love story and a quick happy ending, convinced that they would make me happy forever.

Instead, I continued waiting for you, because I did not believe in happiness that arrived too quickly and claimed it would last forever.

I did not know how long I should wait for you or whether I would still be alive on that day. I waited for a divine sign to tell me when to stop waiting. If I stopped waiting for you today, would that be a betrayal of my love for you? Would a few more days make any difference? That is how those few days quietly turned into many more while I waited for the divine sign.

One day, in the middle of nowhere and in the midst of the universal boredom into which all living creatures had sunk, a thunderclap tore through the sky. It shattered the boredom and the empty idleness of the world. The thunder cut off the electricity. All the televisions exploded. People came outside with large red eyes, looking but not seeing. They could no longer recognise one another. They had become strangers to each other.

Then the thunder struck several more times, and suddenly people began to see again through the violence of the rumbling. But when they recognised one another, they were terrified. They cried out in despair, believing that they were the only surviving beings left on Earth. In each other's eyes they no longer looked human.

Then the thunder struck for the last time, and people rushed into the pubs. The landlords could not pour the wine quickly enough. People rolled drunkenly across the tavern floors, weeping.

Love had left the planet.

When the thunder struck for the last time, lightning tore the heavens apart in an apocalyptic blaze. But even that did not bring love back.

The rain became a flood. The flood hoped to gather all hatred, evil and misery and carry them away from the world of people. It succeeded only halfway. Then the rain stopped. But that did not make people happy again. They still lay like drunken sailors on the floors of the pubs, which the flood had transformed into boats drifting in search of a shore on which to moor.

When the rain washed your face away from the earth, I was about to forget you. When the snow blocked every road leading towards you, and no hope remained that resembled you, I thought it was over. That was the sign I had been waiting for.

And you were forgotten.

As the sun finally rose again above my garden, I set out to seek a new love. I left believing that perhaps, somewhere, I might find you again.

I walked for a very long time. I fell. I rose again. My body became covered with wounds. The wounds were of different depths and carried different histories. Some people told me it was a blessing to bear wounds. It meant that I had suffered. It meant that I was still alive. That He still wanted something from me and had prepared something for me. I simply had to continue walking until I found it.

It was like the children's game of hide-and-seek.

Along the way, the wounds hurt. Some of them bled. Wounds left by betrayal. Wounds left by evil. But none of that mattered. I could ignore the pain of my body because I was searching for you. I was searching for someone who would love me again.

I knew that He loved me. Everyone said that He loved all His children equally. But I was not strong enough to live only with His invisible presence.

So I kept searching.

That is how I arrived at the farm.

The farm that produced silk butterflies stood at the edge of the desert. Beyond the desert began the paradise that some enterprising businessmen had built in order to take money from naïve tourists. The farm offered demonstrations of metamorphosis and transformation—how an ordinary silkworm could become a magnificent butterfly within a month.

The farm was full of eggs from which great silkworms were waiting to hatch. Those silkworms had to die in order to undergo their divine transformation into butterflies. Because after death comes another life. Every new life is born from the death of something else.

The great silkworms lived in order to eat, to die and to be born again as something different from what they had been before. They feared the light. Darkness was their shelter and their preparation for birth after death. Darkness prepared them for metamorphosis.

There was something deeply sacred and mysterious in the solemn way the silkworms hurried to weave their cocoons and disappear from the world inside them. It resembled a sacrifice, as though they willingly offered their lives as gifts to an invisible god. They wove their own silk coffins, climbed inside them of their own accord, and when they awoke to a new life, they no longer remembered what they had once been.

Death does not love the light, because light is a promise that life continues beyond death.

The silkworms knew nothing of this. They simply fulfilled the roles given to them.

The people on the farm played the role of gods—cruel gods. They did not allow the butterflies to be born because they wanted only the silk produced by the worms. They cared nothing for life after death. They cared only for the death that generated profit.

When they heard my story, the people on the farm declared me a saint. According to them, no love story deserved a tragic ending. They said that you did not deserve such faithfulness from me. They believed I was a wise woman who could help others with my advice, so they offered me a job.

They gave me a small office and hung my portrait above the desk with a tiny halo painted around my head. According to the people on the farm, my suffering for you had surpassed all human limits and deserved to be rewarded—not someday, but today, here on the farm.

They appointed me High Priestess.

My task was to decide which cocoons would be allowed to become butterflies and which would become silk.

And then you appeared.

You simply opened the door to my little office, greeted me politely and said that you were looking for a priestess because every sign had led you there. Everyone had told you that this was where the priestess who understood human suffering lived. They said that she could teach you how to survive unbearable sorrow.

You came from a world that had sentenced you to twenty years of boredom and loneliness because you had never tried to change the system. You came from a world that had condemned you to soulless loneliness and conscious suffering. You came from a world in which your heart had long since stopped beating.

When you left me and the thunder tore open the heavens, followed by the flood, you knew that one day you would have to return to me. You realised that you were no longer free because you belonged to our love. You understood that immediately. But there was no way back. The flood was Biblical. You were not a good sailor, and you had no ship.

When you left, the flood surrounded you on every side and prevented you from returning to me because you were not yet ready for me.

When you left, your body was as strong as the stone that carries the power of creation within the Earth. Your body resembled those mythical primordial elements born from the explosion of a star. Your body had gathered abundant stardust, enough to make you burn with experience and passion.

But you were not yet ready for that.

You were content with nothing more than a smouldering fire.

When you left, you began searching for a way back to me. But there was no road—only an immense flood of human tears and suffering.

When you left, you told yourself that you had to find me at any cost because I carried your life inside my heart, and you no longer possessed the key that could set you free.

Then you decided that you needed a sign to find me. You began searching for God's signs in everything around you. You travelled through several countries, asking everywhere whether anyone had seen me. You asked whether anyone had seen the woman who had stolen your heart.

But no one had.

Then, after wandering for so long that you had reached the end of your strength, a beggar took pity on you. He shared his water with you. He shared the little bread that he possessed. You felt that he was a brother in destiny.

The beggar told you that people spoke of a priestess who understood every kind of human suffering. They said she lived at the edge of the desert, on the farm where life was born again after death—a place resembling resurrection itself.

"If you find the silk butterfly farm," he said, "perhaps the priestess will teach you how to survive your suffering and find peace."

So you took the road once more. And after a long journey, you arrived at the farm of resurrection.

When our eyes met, all our suffering came out of us and filled the room with meaning. Years of wandering had changed us, but not enough to prevent us from recognising one another. We both loved our suffering more than ourselves because it was the only thing that still connected us. We had turned suffering into a religion. It had become the meaning of our lives.

At that very moment, in one of the dark rooms of the farm, hundreds of cocoons completed their dying.

After death celebrated yet another victory, it became life's turn to triumph. Hundreds of butterflies flew into the room where You and I stood, overwhelmed. That very day, countless springs burst forth from the desert, promising to quench the thirst of every thirsty soul.

And the resurrection of all living creatures began.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)