text: From the moment she was born, everyone seemed to love Lucy. Like a human lodestar, she had the ability to draw warmth out of anyone around her. She succeeded at everything she attempted, and attempted almost everything. Without a doubt, she was the brightest, kindest, most beautiful woman I ever knew. On a Thursday night, in the heart of a New York blizzard, Lucy took her own life. When they went to bury her, the ground was so frozen they could hardly dig her grave. They lowered her into the cold earth, to cover her presence and hide our shame. There she lies today, bereft of the warmth she inspired in others, abandoned by the world and its people. I have tried talking about it many times; her mother refuses to discuss it. It is an open secret, something that happened and must not be mentioned, better consigned to history than examined in the light of day. That may be, but I can’t keep going like this. I need to talk about what happened. I need it to be told so someone else can remember. One final time, to set it in stone. *In the year of our lord 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, France, a woman walks from her home. She enters into the streets and begins to dance feverishly. Soon, multiple people have joined her. Together they dance as if their very lives depend on it, shaking uncontrollably to the rhythm of an ineffable beat. The illness spreads, there appears to be no obvious vector of transmission. For some, just knowing about its occurrence is enough to spur on an incident. No medical intervention seems capable of easing the ailment. The townspeople turn to god for help. Mass sermons are held, exorcisms are concocted to evict the demon that has gripped the town. It proves ineffective, but this does not stop the peoples’ prayers. There is a sense of the town being held together by prayer alone. Meanwhile, the diseased dance until they collapse from fatigue. Only then are they relieved.* When Lucy died I locked myself in a room for four months. I didn’t see another soul, didn’t hear a voice other than my own and the ones in my head. I ate very little and said even less. I wanted to come to terms with the grief. I wanted to memorize its features, to read its movements and learn its manners. I wanted to size it up like a rival gladiator before a bout. It worked, maybe a little too well. By the time I left the room I could describe every facet of the grief in utmost detail. I can still remember those descriptions today, but I’ve long since forgotten what Lucy looked like. I didn’t cry for years, I still rarely do. We don’t get to decide between what haunts us and what we leave behind. What happens to those things that are forgotten? Those people? A hundred years from now no one will remember Lucy, no one but the earth. Where do those thing go? Where is Lucy now? Everywhere and nowhere. Gone and yet fractured, smashed into a billion little pieces, digging in under my skin. What does that make us? What does that make me? *In 1300 BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten has had enough. In one fell swoop he abandons the old pantheon and replaces them with his own god, Aten. A single man, destined to be the sole intermediary between his world and the next, decides to usurp the gods. He outlaws the worship of the old pantheon. It is largely unsuccessful. In response, Akhenaten’s madness deepens. His laws grow more brutal, his convictions more dire. On paper it was a simple thing: the gods are only as real as they are believed to be. It is he, the pharaoh, who decides what is real for his subjects. And yet the gods are fighting back, refusing to die. As if they know what follows.* *Akhenaten decides a new capital is to be built. In alleyways and dark corners he is dubbed a heretic, yet no one dares to oppose him. The pharaoh’s might is absolute. What was supposed to be a religious execution has become a bitter war, one Akhenaten does not survive. After his death, all signs of him are swiftly erased, along with any mention of his foolish god. The old pantheon is soon returned.* I disappeared from the world. Not in a physical sense but certainly in a spiritual one. I retreated further and further into myself, until I couldn’t recognize who I was. To the world, I became a ghost. In a way, I think it was an attempt at punishment, a way to create a connection between myself and Lucy. None of it was my fault, it just made more sense if it was. At least then I had someone to blame. I quickly managed to put up appearances. It’s not difficult to teach yourself how to go through the motions. Lucy became my excuse for everything, the reason I went home early, the reason I didn’t go out on Fridays, the reason I stopped writing and the reason I couldn’t pick it back up. I didn’t tell anyone of course, it wasn’t any of their business. From the outside it must have looked like I suddenly stopped, like everything about me had ground to an abject and indefinite halt. Lucy’s death was a single, immaculate puzzle, and because I had made myself one of the pieces it had become impossible to solve. That was how I liked it. But life stops for no one, no matter how badly we want it to. In time, the rapturous drumbeat of your heart is destined to overpower any lingering regrets, and you will be forced to stand back up. It wasn’t that I didn’t still need Lucy, it was that I had been faced with an ultimatum: Give up life, or give up Lucy. Some part of me still had enough sense to know it wasn’t what she would have wanted. To hold on any further would mean despoiling her memory past the point of no return. She would die again, and this time I *would* be the one to blame. All these facts were true, even if I was the only one who knew them. They were real, even though they were only in my head. Even from beyond the grave, Lucy had the power to change my life. *In 1519, one year after the Dancing Plague torments Strasbourg, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortéz lands on the shores of modern day Mexico, determined to conquer the newly discovered land for his king and country. A year later, Cortéz and his men arrive in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, a glorious city built upon the waves of a great lake. The city dwarfs anything Cortéz has ever laid his grubby little eyes on.* *They are received by the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma, who declares Cortéz an incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the great feathered serpent. Cortéz is lavished with gold and proceeds to claim this mighty empire for his king.* *The story isn’t true, of course. The Aztecs were far from uneducated. They understood warfare and deception as well as any European warlord. It is, however, the story that was told for generations, a recollection of events so outlandish and intriguing that it could not help but spark a match in the world’s collective imagination.* *It helps that the Aztecs did not get to tell their side of the story. Tenochtitlán was raised to the ground like a modern library of Alexandria. Whether or not Cortéz was a god, he would ultimately herald destruction of biblical proportions.* For all of Lucy’s childhood her mother would always tell her not to believe in anything. ‘Don’t let anyone decide for you’ she would say. Lucy took it to heart, how could she not? When we are young our parents are like gods. We believe their every word because there is nothing else to believe. Those words gave her hope, they became Lucy’s foundation, the very core of her being. They elevated her, allowed her to reach ever better and greater things. They also killed her. When Lucy’s life fell apart there was no one to turn to, no one to blame but herself. She struggled under the weight of her own genius and the implications that genius created. It was torture. It wrenched her apart from the inside out. I tried to help, to find the right words like I’m supposed to do, but I couldn’t. There was no way of reaching her. She was already gone. I hated myself for that. I still do. ... In a perfect world she would have had somewhere to turn. There would have been a figure or ideal to grant her comfort. A God, to deliver absolution. Higher powers provide ambiguity, they serve as a sticky, waxy substance through which we can glance at the truth without being exposed to its power. It’s why there are no wordless gods. The language isn’t just necessary, it’s the point. Language and truth can never occupy the same position. Viewed together they form perfect parallels, lines skirting each others’ edges but never intersecting. In just the same way that I can never make you feel how it felt when Lucy died, even though I remember it clear as day, a god could never have helped her any more than she could have helped herself. But what does that mean? That it isn’t real? That it isn’t worth trying? Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is to be haunted, to be gripped eternally by the feeling that there is something just out of reach that you can’t quite put your finger on, infinitely distant yet uncommonly familiar. After all, real events have no power. It’s only when we start telling them as stories that they begin to carry weight. It’s only when we tell them again that we can make sense of what happened. Often, by the time we do, the real thing has already been lost. So we walk in circles, following the stories we ourselves laid down as tracks, trying to capture the nature of the thing we lost, certain that if we could just hold it in our hands once more, that it would surely bring with it some new perspective, some ancient, antediluvian truth that would make our pain feel just a little lighter. In that sense, we have already become like gods. Because that’s all a god is: a false guide, circling something real, a memory thrice recalled and twice recorded, not a lie, but something adjacent to one. Maybe that was what Lucy needed to hear. Maybe it’s just what I want to believe. Every night I lie in bed and close my eyes. Every night I feel the life drain from my body as my consciousness fades. Every morning I am born anew, without sin, or pain or memory. Every morning I have to reconstruct myself from the broken shards of what remains. I never come out quite the same. When I die, I too will be a memory. Everything I am and was will be compressed until I become a single thing with many facets. A god, a dream, a notion. No one will remember the pain. No one will remember the loss, or the sorrow and horror of a life cut short. No one will remember who I really was. But that’s okay. The earth remembers. The earth *always* remembers.