ACT LIKE YOU LOVE ME

Chapter 21 - Coming Home

"To me, she was,

those final steps,

the turn around the last bend,

the house,

with a light on,

and a fire lit,

and a faint laugh in the distance on the warm wind.

That was she.

She was always my coming home.

(Atticus)

Camila had spent most of the last few years looking for spiritual answers, for purpose, for reasons, for motivation to keep going, for reassurance that there was something waiting at the end of it. She had read books and watched videos and attended lectures and readings and therapy sessions, she had done meditation, and yoga, had her tarot read, and followed the Dalai Lama on Twitter.

But she had never found an answer that she could grab onto. Oh, she had been blown away by the view of life that others had opened her up to, she had learned a lot about herself, her relationships, and life. But not the answer. Of course, they say it's the journey, not the destination.

But now she was in the white world. What else could you call it? It was just white, a stretch of nothingness, an emptiness that was at once full of awareness. She walked through the white world even though she had no corporeal body and there was nothing for her to walk upon. She walked nonetheless. Ahead of her in the nothingness sat a woman, or what appeared to be a woman. She was beautiful with long wavy sunstreaked brown hair, blue eyes that shone with the answers of the universe, a smile from where happiness is born, and she motioned for Camila to sit before her. Looking down, Camila recognised her own earthly body, naked and somehow perfect in it's nudity.

"Sit down, please." The lips didn't move but the words were in her head as if they had been spoken. She folded gracefully, although there was no ground to sit on. Her hair was long, longer than she remembered, covering her breasts all the way to her thighs.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"Nowhere, everywhere, somewhere." The voice said, the woman smiling.

"Why am I here?"

"An easier question, you are ill, and your spirit is, shall we say, taking a little vacation, because it's not pleasant in there at the moment."

"In my body?"

"Yes, there is a war going on in there, and you were weak, but you are winning. You will be the victor soon enough."

"And in my mind?"

"You catch on quickly child. Yes there is a war going on there too, it is a long, drawn out battle."

"A battle over what?"

"You tell me."

"I am battling with myself."

"Are we not all? Is that not the definition of life, the battle to awaken, to go forth, to do good, to be good, to love, to be loved, to accept yourself in all your messy craziness as the perfect person that you are?"

"Why are my battles so......confusing?"

"Understanding what and why we fight is a lifelong struggle."

"You talk in riddles. You talk like the pages in a self-help book."

The beautiful woman chuckled. "I am inside your mind, so maybe that is what I am constructed from. Which means, you have already learned the answers, you just need to apply them to yourself."