54- To Believe
"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." – Hebrews 11:13
How is it that something can be both so wonderful, yet so unbelievably terrible?
So dangerous and yet so comfortingly safe?
So vulnerable to truth and yet so steeled against certainty?
Contradictions are the best way to describe the human experience- maybe every experience one can ever have. Each and every spirit of the studio- new and old- would doubtlessly agree.
…Despite how awful it was to.
Do you know why some people are so peaceful in the face of something absolutely, completely disastrous? Assured in times of the greatest uncertainties? It's because these people know how they feel.
Or they've finally accepted that they don't know at all.
And in opposition, so it is the same that some of the greatest distresses in life are during times of wait- because we aren't sure what to do and how to feel about it as we see something coming our way with no known action to slow or speed its arrival. Even if we logically know it will be okay- that there is nothing more we can do besides let fate come its way- we are helpless but to fret.
Often, it's not the event that we fear but the accumulation of dread in anticipating its arrival, each second a grain added to a rising, choking pit of quicksand wrapping tight around our legs.
So it is that the wait that can kill us.
And so it was the wait that the souls of the studio had been buried with, a grave piled onto the coffin of rebirth after death beside the beaches of ink.
The longest wait of all isn't intended to be outclassed. The drifting tides of life aren't meant to still be free to roam through cracks of eternity, like streams out of a river once someone's body dies and whatever essence that made them alive leaks blindly, beautifully into the universe.
So of course, that which is against the nature of human souls was more frustration, more agony than Francine could ever know. More than what Sammy, Alice, and Norman could ever describe even if they had more than just words.
More than Joey could bear to worsen by his own hand, as much as he feared he could and would.
But of course, the heart is a fierce, resilient thing. So much power in that one spot burning inside your chest that not even a magic that twists your body and mind apart can stop you from finding a way- a way to exist, a way to be.
A way to make even the vilest of hexes worth what you've been forced to give away.
Francine would soon know that each and every soul had a hope- a passion that kept them from falling apart entirely to the grating scrapes of hellfire and shatters of reality, roughened and molded into another form somehow still at least a remnant of who they used to be…
And maybe just a bit of someone new.
Delving into the past had been very different experiences for the two disciples, but they still brought them once again together to the same place; even apart, they had walked hand in hand facing the darkness of uncertainty while feeling shadows of what they once had gnaw at their heels.
And Francine would find that as terrifying as it was, this world was unstoppable in changing who she was too.
It would be up to her and her alone to assure that who she became was someone she wanted to be, and if this shift was a threat or a promise.
Even against the wishes of all who cared for her.