Root (The Liminality, Part One)

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus (Reflections on the Guillotine)

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Chapter 1: The Liminality

Across the pond, a willow dances for me, branches twisting and swaying despite the absence of a breeze. The water’s stillness and sterility annoy me. Surface uncreased, depths devoid of fish or worms or even plankton, it may as well have been a pool of mercury.

I toss a pebble. Ripples expand and rebound off the shore, distorting the mirrored sky, cloudless yet grey. I toss another before they fade.

On a throne carved into the muddy bank, I wait for Karla, hopeful and calm, stable at my core. How much I’ve changed, in less than a year of coming to this place, as if all the neurons in my brain have been ripped apart and reconfigured. I’m only nineteen, but I feel ancient.

Stray sprigs of tamed root inch across the flats, tensing and releasing their spirals. One severed tendril pauses at my feet, sensing the presence of its master. Slowly, it curls and uncurls in time with my breath, reflecting my inner mood. I send it on its way with a glare.

Curious now, how my former foes wait at my beck and call like empathetic dogs. I used to think they were the nastiest things, before I learned how to domesticate them. So malleable and helpful, who knew these roots existed only to serve?

When I say ‘roots,’ I don’t mean those scraggly, dirty things that anchor trees and channel their life-giving nutrients. Sure many here resemble something you might dig up from under a maple tree, but that’s just one iteration of their boggling diversity. You’ll find roots here as fine as spider silk or as thick as tree trunks, those that glow or vibrate, hollow ones, some slick and translucent that pulse and gurgle from their inner flows. I wouldn’t be surprised if some carried electricity or blood.

They creep and climb and wind themselves into thick and ropy tangles. They can wriggle like manic nightcrawlers or lie inert as deadwood, all mossy and frayed like the moorings of some old boat forgotten in a bayou.

They’re sentient sometimes, scheming and conniving against us souls, working in concert with the Reapers. But I don’t think it’s voluntary. Reapers are Weavers, too. They just do their dirty work and get on with it. They don’t need to show off or brag.

To ‘weave’ a root is to possess it. Their diversity and mutability can be harnessed to any purpose imaginable. They’re the raw material of dreams. We can join them, split them, make them hard as steel or soft as mush. With a glance, I spread one out into a sheet as thin as paper. I fold it into a crane and add it to the pile beside me.

Karla taught me all the origami I know. After the tsunami in Japan, she had folded hundreds after hearing about some kind of fund-raising scheme for the victims, only to find that no one in her country knew what to do with a sack of paper cranes.

They’ll stay set for quite a while, once woven. But quite a while doesn’t mean forever. They tend to revert back to their native state in a month or so, or even sooner if you don’t feel strongly enough about what you’ve woven. So far, none of my cranes have dared unfold themselves.

You don’t go to Root, by the way. It comes to you. If you're unlucky enough to have your soul plunge off the deep end, the roots will come a fetching. You’ll know they’ve arrived from those fleeting blurs in your peripheral vision, those stray itches and random crawly sensations that brush or scrape against your limbs.

They’re attracted to depression of the deepest, darkest sort. They can sniff out the truly suicidal and I don't mean the dabblers. They’ll lurk and drag you down just when you think you couldn't possibly get any lower.

But it's not so bad here, once you get past the Reapers. Some of us can weave a decent life out of the place. Life? Well, maybe that’s not the right word for it.

Subsistence? Persistence? Existence?

Though I do feel more alive in Root than I ever did in the world of my birth. My soul lives on here, happy, or at least hopeful, as I wait for my love to return.