Chapter one of Laenif is already available, here's the second chapter: "To Change," featuring a shift from third-person omnipresent narration to emotional first person narration
Laenif: Book One
Chapter 2: To Change (spiritual science fiction)
The first thing Ghoid felt was his connection to his sun. Its heated energy swayed and molded his insides until he could feel his bond to Laenif’s entire solar system. From there, his mind expanded until he was able to touch the center of the universe, the one origin from which possibility stretches out in all directions. And as Ghoid approached this, he felt everything. He also felt the reality of nothing. A place with no time, no space, and no gravity.
To amputate the idea of time is to say a lot when telling a story. To have a beginning with an immediate end, with nonexistent space to fill, is to sacrifice what is deemed holy. But if time and space are nonexistent, what becomes of progression and evolution? What happens to ideas and dreams?
Ghoid was lost in what felt like eternity.
Then he opened his eyes and the Earth’s sun smacked him on the face, stabbing his pupils. He felt sickened by his new location in the universe, by this unfamiliar orbit. His mind tried adjusting with this different sun and these oceans… but they were everywhere. Water saturated this planet.
Ghoid struggled to make sense of the energy pulsating around him. He ravenously reached with desperation for a point of reference. And when he eventually succeeded, he noticed he was by a river in what felt like a calm northern forest.
Trees glimmered reflective orange foliage. Ghoid breathed in deep. As he lay on his back in the muddy ground, he listened to the singing of a blue jay. It took a while to stand up and get a true sense for the planet he had just arrived on. So far this place resembled Laenif a little bit. The trees were smaller and less sturdy though. And Ghoid did feel different in an unsettling way. It felt like Earth had a more clogged, and much more perplexed, sense of being. His third eye was showing him many disturbances in the planet’s mind. It was as though the cares of the universe had been replaced by individual desires and ignorance. He noticed vibrations of this reality didn’t evolve spherically like beauty had intended. It was easier to skew intentions of consciousness as the emanations enthralled his mind. Ghoid wasn’t certain why, though.
He roamed to where he thought he might find someone. His third eye showed him so much, and it gave him a profound sense of interconnection with the universe. So he intuitively followed this through some of the woods and up a hill. The muscles in his legs quaked with slight tremors as he climbed. Reaching the top, a mixture of dark rocks and hardened tar formed a solid river that lay before him.
And that was the first time I saw Ghoid, as he came out of that forest beside the street. When I saw him, I was surprisingly not scared… I was simply intrigued. A little green man; I would have never suspected it to happen to me. Ghoid is my gift from the stars. He is my answer to spiritual mysteries that baffle me and all things that make me frustratingly question myself, this world, and others around me. When he first stared at me, I was taken in by his wide open and vibrantly alive third eye.
His curiosity poured into all depths of my mind, forcing me to feel things I never considered possible. “Hello friend,” he said.
My heart panicked to a faster pace and I felt, at first anyway, unworthy to communicate with such an enlightened existence. “Hey…”
“Can you take me somewhere safe?” he pleaded. “Somewhere where I can be comfortable?”
I couldn’t say no. I knew the rest of the world would have wanted to know about Ghoid. They would’ve wanted to study him, use him, sell him, but I had faith in taking him in and hiding him. I knew it was a risk and sure, people tend to frown on taking risks, but I’ve come to notice that the most massive and powerfully beautiful things hold origins from something small, common, and simple… that one day decided to take a risk.
Look at life. Look at the energetic passion of consciousness. It could have all come from one seed, one egg. For if one can multiply something good inside of itself, one will probably have desire to. Oh, but desire is such a bitter apple. Love’s the sweeter fruit I’m sure, but has there ever been a point in mankind’s lengthy life where the body did not want or need? My heart was pumping blood through my veins so fast I could hardly control my thoughts.
“Yes,” I told him after gazing helplessly into his third eye. “Take my hand. We’re going to have to hurry.”
As he grabbed onto my palm with daunting trust, he worried, “Are there people who will come for me?”
“Yes,” I replied. And we started walking a little faster. If anybody had been witnessing me lead an alien to my house, what would become of me? “There are people who will not listen to you if you are different,” I explained.
“Blinded by fear? Or is it because they only feel similarities with brothers when making point of the differences in others?” Ghoid’s mind was still tense and excited from his metaphysical journey. His speech was beginning to blabber as he tried his best to grip a tighter hold on this place.
“I don’t know. When we get to my house we can have more time to think,” I assured him.
“Okay. Good choice. It’s always best to keep rough emotion out of dire thought, I’ve realized. That’s why I relax a lot now and try to think cleanly, because you can’t numb all your unpleasant emotions away. I need to feel what I need to feel.” He continued to ramble as I led him to my house by way of a back black gravel path. “Then your actions would be driven on desensitized intention and you’d be left with different consequences than those intended by the source of your thoughts and emotions. The two run together in parallel dreams…”
Everything he said seemed to make so much sense, but he also appeared unaffected by the situation we were in. He didn’t realize there were people who could ruin our possible future.
When we first got to my townhouse, I was struck with wild paranoia. I peered out all of my windows to make sure no one was coming for me or if anybody even noticed. Then I turned around from my gaze and I found Ghoid looking at me again. I instantly felt his love, appreciation, and gratitude as I returned the stare. It washed my life clean. There was nothing compared to feeling so alive after being so numb. And as I felt this new calming mood, I noticed how asleep and how numb I had really been.
“My name’s Marsle,” I said.
“I’m Ghoid.”
I remember thinking then that he wasn’t real, that the whole concept of his existence was a figment of my imagination. Yet I felt truly the energy he beamed. It couldn’t have been produced from insanity, could it? I recall wondering if I had ingested some intense psychoactive drug without knowing it.
“Where do you come from?” I asked. “Another planet?”
He smiled before shoveling some air in his lungs to reply, “I come from Laenif, the spiritual sister of Earth.” He started carousing around my house.
“Where? Why have you come? And how did you get here?” I held so much jumbled uncertainty that needed to be answered and eroded.
“I came to bring peace to our unified consciousness. For my kind are trying to evolve to a slumbered yet peaceful life, and humans bring in so much rage and confusion. Greed. I feel that now. I felt it as soon as I got here. Ignorance festers where your love and life should glow for Earth. Where did the passion go? Are you all in fear of disconnection? Because fear is what disconnects you.”
I was absorbed by what he had to say. Like a helpless child caught in the ocean’s rip tide, I was lost in Ghoid. Some strange energy surrounding him carried an immense peace to my mind. It was like he took everything I hated about myself away. He took me away from myself and what remained was space for a new life to start. One with foundations built by knowledge he was to give.
“Wait…” I tried responding, scavenging for the right thing to say. “What do you mean unified consciousness?”
“Isn’t it beautiful how we understand each other’s words?” he quipped. Our hearts pounded even faster. My life had changed so suddenly, too quickly for me to grasp it. I was speechless.
“Earth and Laenif experienced the creation of life simultaneously,” Ghoid explained. “Therefore along the timelines of our paths, we share a similarity that still connects us. Things you do on Earth affect what we do and what we feel on Laenif because you are just a different perception of us. We are what you could have been, and you are what we might have been…”
His curiosity poured into all depths of my mind, forcing me to feel things I never considered possible. “Hello friend,” he said.
My heart panicked to a faster pace and I felt, at first anyway, unworthy to communicate with such an enlightened existence. “Hey…”
“Can you take me somewhere safe?” he pleaded. “Somewhere where I can be comfortable?”
I couldn’t say no. I knew the rest of the world would have wanted to know about Ghoid. They would’ve wanted to study him, use him, sell him, but I had faith in taking him in and hiding him. I knew it was a risk and sure, people tend to frown on taking risks, but I’ve come to notice that the most massive and powerfully beautiful things hold origins from something small, common, and simple… that one day decided to take a risk.
Look at life. Look at the energetic passion of consciousness. It could have all come from one seed, one egg. For if one can multiply something good inside of itself, one will probably have desire to. Oh, but desire is such a bitter apple. Love’s the sweeter fruit I’m sure, but has there ever been a point in mankind’s lengthy life where the body did not want or need? My heart was pumping blood through my veins so fast I could hardly control my thoughts.
“Yes,” I told him after gazing helplessly into his third eye. “Take my hand. We’re going to have to hurry.”
As he grabbed onto my palm with daunting trust, he worried, “Are there people who will come for me?”
“Yes,” I replied. And we started walking a little faster. If anybody had been witnessing me lead an alien to my house, what would become of me? “There are people who will not listen to you if you are different,” I explained.
“Blinded by fear? Or is it because they only feel similarities with brothers when making point of the differences in others?” Ghoid’s mind was still tense and excited from his metaphysical journey. His speech was beginning to blabber as he tried his best to grip a tighter hold on this place.
“I don’t know. When we get to my house we can have more time to think,” I assured him.
“Okay. Good choice. It’s always best to keep rough emotion out of dire thought, I’ve realized. That’s why I relax a lot now and try to think cleanly, because you can’t numb all your unpleasant emotions away. I need to feel what I need to feel.” He continued to ramble as I led him to my house by way of a back black gravel path. “Then your actions would be driven on desensitized intention and you’d be left with different consequences than those intended by the source of your thoughts and emotions. The two run together in parallel dreams…”
“But you have replaced the sun and the stars with apparitions constructed by human perception.” Ghoid shook his head and then brought his three eyes into my two. “You say you gave your soul to God. How?” He clutched a hold of my hand and reminded me of the love I wanted to be wrapped in. It reminded me why I had to endure such harsh realizations.
“I’m a Catholic,” I announced with a brittle tone. “I follow Jesus, the Son of God. Sacraments have been handed down throughout ages and when I die, it will be through him that I pass into Heaven.” My beliefs sounded silly to me as I said them then for Ghoid had just shattered everything I had ever thought to be real.
Then he tightened his hold on my fist. “I’m sorry to have to tell you more you wish not to hear sweet Marsle, but Heaven is just a place in the mind. You have to unveil it while you’re still alive. In truth, individual life after death is but another apparition. Another illusion constructed by the mind to make you feel less alive than you really are, to make you give up precious time you have now to manipulate possibility. Do not eat up beliefs because others are offering you a plate of theirs. See beyond deceitful veils. The one truth is inside you, Marsle. You are the one who defines your own reality.”
I began to sob. Did he have to be right about everything? Did he have to make so much sense? “How did you get here?” I demanded. “Did you come on a spaceship that could take me back to your home? Back to what sounds like peace?”
“I was sent here by the will of the universe because of my opened eye.” He came in closer. “And I am like you now: stuck. We are so stuck with nothing but what seems like mere remnants of a long forgotten peace. Possibly you and I could bring the pieces back together…”
“Is there even anything left of a holy existence in this apathetic place?”
“Yes…” Ghoid responded. “You have to open your third eye to really see it, though. Maybe after you have done that, we could illuminate a remaining hope. Maybe we can find something holy really does still linger here.”
I looked up at him. “How would I get my third eye?”
“I don’t know.”
We paused quietly for a moment there. While an unexpected wave of calming moods splashed between us, I slipped into a lucid trance. But when I reluctantly shook out of it, I stared into the big beautiful eye above Ghoid’s normal two to ask, “But even if we do find something pure buried beneath this pseudo city, what would prevent it from digging itself back under? From sinking into quicksand once again? I thought I found true love once and I turned out to be wrong. So answer me this: after finding love… how long does it take for suffering to emerge again?”
Sitting next to me on the couch, Ghoid brought his face to my ear and whispered a soft vibration that could never be captured by silly words. Yet what he expressed changed my life forever. Everything that I had ever thought to be real deteriorated away in that single instant to reveal an unbearable, impossible truth hidden beneath my very existence, forcing me to comprehend that all along the truth had been cloaked by the delusion of my own significance.
And so we just stayed there for a while. He was gripping me while I embraced him. It took me so long to figure out why this felt so damn euphoric… and I have come to realize that it was because for the first time in however long, the two halves of our consciousness were together. Usually separated physically by massive cosmic distances, the two parts of our one mind had finally come back together in a manifestation of new life… A broken sun had been reformed.
“Ghoid…” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“Don’t ever leave…”
“Where ever I go, you will be there. I know you better than I know myself, because you are just like me when I still had but two eyes…”
“Back on Laenif?”
“Yes. In my village. Deep within the forest of Phoresion. Back when I thought the myths were but silly tales. Back when I didn’t care much about my family or my home. And now I miss them so much. I can’t stop resenting the fact that throughout my childhood all that mattered to me was what I wanted and what I received and how I felt.” He shook his head. “But really, before I had this eye, I didn’t even know who I actually was…”
I rolled over on my back and stared out my window towards the setting sun. “How did you get your third eye?” When I turned back around to face him, he was asleep. And I don’t think I asked him that again for a couple weeks. Maybe it was because I didn’t remember to ask. Maybe it was because I didn’t truthfully want to know.
The following morning I explained to him that I was going to work at the bank and that he would have to stay in the house and keep quiet. He didn’t mind. I showed him the spare bedroom, and he appeared very grateful for the space. “Thank you Marsle,” he would say. “You’ve saved me with your kindness.”
All that I really remember about those first few months with Ghoid was that I felt, for the first time in my life, like I wasn’t alone. Like I would never have to be alone again. Ghoid was my alien; my angel. He was my secret and my confidant. And he was all mine.
The weeks flew by. It was just the two of us. Nothing else mattered. I was lost in what felt like a dream. A dream in which my past burst into embers, faded away, and then flung my mind toward the infinite paradox of nature. And as Ghoid was helping me realize this holy beauty, he struggled with his own situation. He was sent here to save Earth’s consciousness, but had no idea where (or how) to undertake such a daunting and vague task.
But we both agreed that him staying with me in secret was a good plan for at least the time being. I of course didn’t mind because I loved talking to Ghoid about everything, even things that made me mad or upset. I loved him because he allowed me to be able to become aware of what has been defined as a spirit. He helped me find a powerful spirit within myself. And the more time I spent with Ghoid, the more it grew. And grew.
And then one day, I turned to him and wondered again, “How did you get your third eye?”
This time he heard me.
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