Trust In What?

“Trust in what? In you? I don’t even know who you are and all I know about you is that you keep everything hidden behind a veil of secrecy and you have the power to change things and don’t. So why should I trust you?”

She shook her head, “I never said any of that. You assumed all of it. That and ascribed far more to my abilities than are truthfully there. The only power I really have is that of sight. True sight and true seeing. Beyond that I only retain the same things you do. I can only do what anyone else can do.”

I laughed, bitterly shaking my head, “Bullshit. You put me in this body. You can do-“

“I didn’t,” she interrupted me, “Not precisely. I did what you can do and what anyone can. I guide and I gesture and I direct, pointing in the doorways that you must step through. Because that is all anyone can do. Because revelations require action from a single source and that source can only come from within.”

“No,” I shook my head, “I don’t believe you didn’t have a hand in this.”

“But I-“ she started, but I slapped my hands down hard on the desk, the sound of it echoing through the room and rippling through the illusion of this dream as if it was made of water. As if it was the surface of a pond.

“You could come to them,” I insisted, “Like you came to me. Like you’ve come to others. You could help them.”

There is a long still silence and I know a part of her is trying to figure out how to deny it. That or correct some little detail that I apparently don’t quite get so that we can spin off and focus on that instead of the point at hand which is that she could help others too. She who is without time or anchor could help everyone, but doesn’t.

So why me and not them?

“Not every situation warrants the same response,” she said, sighing and giving in, “You would benefit from this move, others would not. Others need other kinds of help.

“Others… their problems are too subtle or too big to be solved through a move such as this. They require interrogation and action in the place at which they are occurring. They require interruption or they require a shock to the system or they require a shoulder to lean on. They require so many other things, but not this. Not what you have.

“More than anything they require guidance, as you did. But guidance from me would not help.”

I was staring her dead in the eye when my brow broke into a furrow and worry wrote itself onto the features of my face. I blinked hard to fight back tears of helplessness as I begged her for an answer.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“The guiding hand to a better life can be swift or subtle,” she told me, “It can be strong or gentle. Sometimes all that is required is the right moment of contact. Something simple. Just one single moment.”

It was a cryptic response and not the one I hoped for, but the truth was it was the only one I would get from her and I understood that.

“So I have to try then? I have to try what I can?”

She shrugged, “You don’t have to do anything. But if you want to help someone then try you must.”

“And I can’t know? What to do or when to act? I’ll never know that.”

Like a fishing line tugging at the corner of her mouth a smile turned up at the edges and she relaxed into it, sensing the tension in me lifting.

“It is hard to know that and harder still to accept it. But all is not without hope, my dear. After all you’ve walked this path before. In different shoes but it’s still the same path. You know the twists and bends and turns. You know the pebbles beneath your feet. You know when the ground will give way beneath you.”

“And when it does?” I asked her.

“Don’t let it,” she replied.

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