The Garden of Peace

I’m almost at the grocery store when it stops raining. There were probably other clues. The world is littered with omens hiding in amens. (I wrote something kin to that last night, the idea having stuck with me.) I ponder a scene for The Empty Book about how every amen is really an ‘aw, men’ with various inflections and how Sara would present that to Brodie. I’ve lost myself in the peace of making fiction for a moment, but the moment passes when the sidewalk turns into dirt.

I stop. Blink. There is no parking lot ahead of me, the shopping bag in my pocket almost laughable. I am in a field of plants taller than I am. Sunflowers are walking around on pebbled paths. Wheat sky scrapers fill the air to my left. I don’t recognize most of what is here.

“A garden full of weeds.” I pitch the words to carry. Wait.

“Nope! Gardens only have flowers,” and Jay is in front of me, glaring up. All 11 and so jaysome with it.

“I thought that might get your attention. Jay. I’m getting groceries. I’m writing part of a story later. I don’t have time for – for this?”

“Everyone has time to be more jaysome. J is J, you know!”

Creating fictional characters is one thing. Having them try and help your own life is something else. “Where are we?”

“This is the garden of peace, where the flowers you pick are inside you and it took a lot of time to find!” He grins, huge and beaming, and every flower turns toward the feel of it.

I can feel sunlight and warmth, the gentle sounds of rain and earth. There is peace here: not a thing to be attained, but a tranquillity that simply is. Everything moves in harmony, every pattern a binding. Only no one else is here.

“Jay. Why did it take a long time to find?” I say slowly.

“Oh, it was really far away from Charlie and Honcho and even you and I had to move through lots of universes to find it. But this place is all about jaysome and you can be extra extra jaysome here!”

I sigh. “Jay. I am jaysome enough in my own life, I think –.”

“Nopes! Because you wrote stuff last night about a dad hurting his son a lot!”

“... that is fiction, Jay. It’s not real.”

“But I’m fiction too, only I’m the real kind!”

“So every fiction I write should be jaysome?”

“Uh-huh! Since otherwise it might lead to people being not-jaysome, and that would be really bad-face!”

“But we have to embrace our nonjaysomeness, or how else do we find our jaysome?”

“By being jaysome,” Jay says, letting out a definitely hugey sigh. “Man. This is going to take a lot more than the garden, won’t it?”

“I – no, this is fine,” I say.

“We can go into the centre of the garden.” And the world ripples. There is a door. It is hungry and cold, and not a thing that is part of a garden of peace at all.

Even Jay pauses at the door.

“What is beyond that?” I ask.

“Oh! There is a glass marble in the middle of the garden and! if it is rubbed in a certain way it causes a happy memory to be remembered! So you can run it and keep jaysome!”

“And this door protects it?”

“Uhm.”

“Jay.”

“It is also maybe protected by three Jayseltosche’s but! if they give it up it’ll work jaysomely!”

I take a deep breath. “There is only one Jay. And if these are – piece of you in the future, you don’t want to meet them.”

“But that’s an adventure! Wow! You really only like fake surprises, don’t you?!” Jay demands.

“No. But I know real ones aren’t always the kind of surprises one wants to have.”

There is a sound on the other side of the door. Movement. Voices. Power. Dark matter itself will be one of the parts of Jay in this room. Himself when he is older another. I don’t know what the third will be, but I know it is something Jay won’t be able to understand. Being jaysome is what he is.

“They are guarding a memory, Jay. And they need it more than you need this adventure, and far more than I need a false peace.” I am not the wandering magician. I am nothing like Honcho, but I’ve written his adventures long enough to mimic what he would say.

“But but but!”

“Jay. These are Jayseltosche’s, which isn’t the same as Jay at all. None of them are eleven, and you would be too much jaysome for them. You are their Achilles Heel, and you’d only hurt them. Jaysome can hurt too, even if you never intend it.”

“I know.”

And he does know that. I don’t when when he learned. I take a deep breath, move away from the door.

“Jay. This stone, this marble. It’s not going to help.”

“But if you remember lots of happy things you’ll be more jaysome!”

“Your story won’t change. I am writing it. I know how it ends.”

“But but I’m helping you be more jaysome!”

“Oh, you are. Believe me. But your story is a stone thrown in a lake, Jay. For every bounce, it still has the same trajectory. And nothing that ends can be without sadness.”

Jay says nothing. He begins to circle me, looking at me, into me, through me.

“There will be ripples, when the stone lands. Adventures and wonders and so much jaysome,” I say quickly, stumbling over the words. “But there is still an ending, Jay.”

“Nope.” And he says that with a certainty that causes even the marble to crack. I can hear that from outside, because the door is open a crack. Somehow I missed that earlier.

“You’re the third Jayseltosche.” Jay does not move. “If you were really Jay, there is no way you’d have avoided the adventure of entering the room. Where is Jay?”

“Away from here. You are right about him. He would destroy even a garden of peace, because jaysome is more than peace can ever be.”

“I know. I was being careful not to wonder about that. The stone won’t help.”

“You will destroy me. And you are not sorry?”

Sometimes Achilles Heel isn’t as worrying as his Hell. “Change isn’t always destruction. Stagnation isn’t jaysome,” I say, as gently as I dare to.

And I am somewhere else. A garden, this one breathtaking in colour and scope and Jay is bouncing through it and grinning from ear to ear. The garden is everything the door was not, and that’s all I want to say about it.

“Look look look! I found some fakesurprise, and cruxy and mox and some feverfewm and admiraljane and an ellenya rhyming vine and bet you’re totally hanging on in quiet –.”

“I get the idea,” I say before Jay can find every single person he follows on tumblr.

“The fake surprise is really funny since sometimes it has real ones?!”

“Well, every story has jaysome hiding inside it. Or it wouldn’t be a story at all?”

And Jay grins at that in delight, snags my hand and returns me home.

Sometimes one has to be meta in order to survive.

I have no idea if I did a good thing today. Or a bad one.

I suspect I’ll never know, no matter how many stories I write to try and understand.

The Achilles heel of the author, that stories always go places where even we cannot follow. But I think I can find some peace with that, and continue to get groceries.

Jay does not return with another adventure to help me be more jaysome.

I think that means I am safe, which I realize isn’t a jaysome thing to be.

Ooops.