Heart Less Love

Part Three: Soul

"You came for me… that was enough, wasn't it?"

If she is the body, and he is the mind, I guess that makes me the soul.

What is a soul?

Is it the heart the seat of all human reason? Of course, many will say that the mind does such but the mind, I believe, just records all the experiences you have in relation to these reasonings, these emotions and feelings. Such is the phrase, 'Follow your heart'. You don't hear anyone suggesting following their mind? Or perhaps even more clearly, the phrase, 'the heart knows best.'

So I am feeling. I am the lost emotions and voices I have become sunken into.

What a mess, what a strange array of unsorted and fruitless desires and unrequited reactions I have become. Where once, I was simply passive, there it was that I suddenly became reactionary. It was there on the verge of changing me forever, that I knew I would do something else.

I would change more than simply the world.

The more profound change came with how people thought and lived their lives.

Many people can say they've changed the world, but how many can say they have forcefully and for the better, affected lives for generations, maybe even forever?

…and sadly, I don't remember it clearly.

Faces in the glass of my mind are murky. They are familiar, I know some and dread others, there are memories locked away, deep inside my soul, my heart where I am unwilling to venture.

And why should I?

The Planet had its reasons for bringing me back.

There is still so much to do.

I wish it all could have been over for me when I had crumpled on the altar, but then I needed to use the Life Stream so I roused from agonised watching of the girl called Tifa to do so. Then, changing with every increment of power awakened in my thirsty and depthless mind, I slept briefly until the sickness came into the lifestream again and I was awakened once more.

The sickness was Jenova, long reaching talons still digging into countless lives long after she has passed, long after she has gone away. The GeoStigma which affected people from as young as birth to elderly age was a sickness caught from protracted vicinity of the life stream.

Marlene said that Geo Stigma was the Planets backlash against the humans because it was angry. She might not be very wrong indeed.

I passed away and those who could have prevented it, humans, simply stood about and watched as I fell down into death with shadows of memory clinging to me as a shroud. The Planet was angry, angry they had just stood there, angry they didn't stay, angry no shrine was made to mark my martyrs grave. I didn't mind, of course, a grave is not where the spirit lies after all. But the disease of Jenova provoked a stronger backlash than I had anticipated from the Planet. It forced the bodies of man to compensate for the new disease, their antibodies working hard against the infection. But overzealousness and anger hidden deep within the spirit of this world leaked out and the antibodies over compensated and ended up making people sicker.

Yes, the Planet was angry but also no, it really did wish to help.

I came to help when everything seemed on the verge of falling apart and even then, I could only just recall things on the edge of my blurred memories, fading into the stream that is life, all life, on this world.

Towards the end, there was a lot of pain.

Because I could remember properly, Tifa and Cloud, love and friendship. I could remember that I missed them terribly, even if Zack continued to protect me inside the Lifestream the same as he had done since meeting me on the streets of Midgar, hiding me from ShinRa.

A window of my life, open, closed, open, closed, open…

The draft is coming in, chill as winter.

I came back.

Why?

I think I knew, or maybe thinking I thought that I knew, a lie in a lie wrapped around a truth… or something. I don't know, it's all very hard to make sense of.

I came back, because I missed you.

That I had some work still to do was peripheral to the hidden strength I drew from knowing I'd be among you all again.

You know, I have to ask this, so don't be angry.

Do you… hate… him?

You know. Him.

I don't. I sympathise, pity perhaps, but I don't blame him. I forgive him freely. I do it because no one else could.

Wouldn't you wonder too at it?

Jenova, you ask, what is that anyway?

A secret truth hidden inside the temple of the Ancients, an old set of riddles that I knew the meaning to but kept to myself because I thought there would be no need for me to draw these back out into the open again after all this time.

They say:

Across forever skies, flung centuries
Distant star falling in flaming demise;
To ground and deeper ground in ice.

Inside the heart of all creation
Beats steady vein of malevolence
And all that once was, or is, or shall be
Shall pass beyond into nothing again.

It's pretty cryptic, I know.

I guess you're astonished that someone who can't even remember if you crack eggs or not before baking with them, or even put the knife and fork on the table the right way can recall this when everything else is a blur.

But this is really, dreadfully important. It's from this that I knew what would happen if I didn't succeed… and also from this that I know now, I would come once more. Of the materia known to us in the world, there is only one white material and one black. Why is that?

White materia that I has can call the power of Holy, the ultimate magic of the Cetra. It sustained, invigorated and protected – a basic cure-all for the Planet they live upon. But the Black one?

When Jenova fell from the skies long ago, it wasn't precisely as we imagine it to be. The black Materia actually called down a meteor for Jenova. Jenova, a corruption of the Canyon tribe's word for 'Fearful God', was an alien from another Planet, much like the Cetra.

Only where Cetra went to create and nourish, the race from which Jenova descended sought to destroy.

It is a well known cycle of primal forces in the world, creation and destruction.

What isn't so well known, is that the Materia coloured black was never from this world. It came from outer space. It wasn't a chunk of solidified life stream like which the Cetra used. It was the devastating power of the 'Jenova' race.

That's why Sephiroth could use it. I suppose in essence, Cloud could use it too, Zack if he lived, even Hojo after he injected himself. But when the crater at the Knowlespole collapsed with the death of Sephiroth's mortal form and mental dissipation into the Planet, the black materia was lost to us forever.

I am unsure if this is for better or for worse.

I know the cycle of life and death, the eternal wheel of life will yawn on and on through the centuries… and for some reason, it deemed fit to bring me back to life.

But a life where I remember only shards of everything I was and everything I did…

I know this though.

I loved.

I loved and was loved deeply.

I always kept it inside, but that's alright. Now I have time to find the words I need to say it. Now I know just what it is that I want to say. I know it as surely as I know the sun rises and sets and the world outside the window is the world I fought for, at peace, at loving and ever lasting peace.

And you, when you sing in the shower or leave coffee mugs on the desk without a mat to stand it on, when you track mud in the house as kids, laughing, Denzel and Marlene, both come running after you, laughing too. I love that. I love your hair flying, I love your laughter without the edge of self loathing it used to contain, I love the home made pasta you cook, I love how you always collapse face down into the pillows on the bed with a hearty groan and ah, I love beyond reason how you fuss with my necklace and always blush when you call me 'Rissy'.

I love it.

And my greatest sin, the greatest sin of all, was never saying it.

…was loving… and never once telling you…

And…I'm sorry…