There she was. He had waited an eternity to see her face again. But there was no such thing as eternity for her, he knew. If only he’d had the time ... how ironic. A few seconds more ... a few seconds of safety before he made it through the shimmering surface of the gateway through which they could not pass (someone, sometime, would call it the eye of a needle). But those seconds turned to eons, centuries, billions upon billions of breaths, lives, civilizations, before he might see her again. But if she was right, time and things like it, were ethereal.

And now here she was, painted onto the perfect canvas of a human memory, candid and full of motion. He could see her form as clearly as the day they parted, him leaving her that morning beneath the stars as he left to fight the good fight. He could hear the rich timbre of her voice, as deep and enrapturing as the velveteen cloak of the salty sea, floating wrapped in weightlessness with nothing but the sky and the surf and the rays of the near-immortal sun. But her eyes ... her eyes were dark, warm with compassion, but lacking in brilliance, as though she had shed their unnatural luster in tears of pigment, until they were bled dry. Maybe that’s what it meant to live the life she had dreamed - free of all the burdens of suffering in this existence. Maybe to rejoin this magnificent whole, you had to lose what it was that made you brilliant. Maybe to love all, and to feel compassion for each and every suffering, meant to cry yourself into their much-worshipped Anatman. Maybe after so many tears you were even more empty than the numbness of a soldier who had lost so many in war. That was a no-self he could understand, and not one he wished to spend an eternity in.

A trail of smoke traced itself before his features, revealing enough to show that there was meaning buried deep in that chaos - that there was some sort of harmony to this all, found from the smallest part to the greatest. But he could not see it, even now. He was not ready to let go. He was too transfixed by the compassion in her stare.

And then she was reaching out, past the piles of fruit left in offering, shaking off the gilded coloring that had her entrapped - a statue coming to life, even gold-painted eyes dark.

Someone thought that she looked like a woman from something called a’ movie’ about a spy who wore something called a ‘tuxedo.’ He did not know this someone, yet he did. He knew him almost as intimately as he knew himself, and yet there was a barrier ... they had never met. But perhaps it was more intimate that way. That’s what she had said, hadn’t she? That you could love lovers and strangers and enemies all alike?

But it was that someone’s eyes through which he was seeing her, because there was this sense of awed wonder curling in his belly - not the awe that he felt every moment he spent basking in her presence, but a different kind of awe - the awe of newness. He could never be new again.

And she smiled. But it was not a smile meant for him, because in that smile there was sorrow. It was an accepting kind of sorrow, and not an unkind one, he supposed, but it was not the smile he had grown to love, distorted now as though seen through layer upon layer of the finest silk, of clouds that drifted across the gap that separated them. In this frail corpse, shaken to the core by the very effort of memory, they could not truly be together. Here, in the delusion of a body, one hoped for love of another but never truly achieved it.

He reacquainted himself with the feelings of this body, even if just in the fragile trappings of memory. Long years spent in dormant contemplation, longing for her, had let the sensations of existence fade. They were wrong when they said that attachment was for the sensualist. He did not long for the feel of the wind in his hair, the warm kiss of the sunlight, not food, nor wine, nor pleasurable company. He did not even remember sight or sound or touch, all of which seemed so irrelevant with nothing out there to demand he feel. The only thing he longed for in the emptiness was her, and now that she was standing before him he found that in a body such as this the only way for him to even brush up against her brilliance was through these petty sensations.

He felt this new strange skin, itchy and painful. Pain. That was something he had not felt in such a long time. He remembered not wanting it. He remembered a life lived trying to avoid it, or do what he was stubbornly convinced was its opposite. It was biting now, but he could barely comprehend it. He knew that it was something that beings shied away from, but he had detached himself from the impulse, even as the pain crawled through this awkward skin like insects burrowing civilizations into the helpless pulp of the jungle floor.

Then there was sight - her, brilliant before him, painted in colors, not emotions, and only a moment, a glimpse like what this mind referred to as a ‘snapshot.’ The golden trinkets of the altar and this statue come alive were almost enough to overwhelm him. He squinted against the gaudy splendor, and felt a stirring of disbelief, not his own.

And then there was sound, vibrating around him from all sides. Words, prayers, the beat of his own heart, less than both sound and feeling ... yet, more somehow. He could feel the molecules in his own chest vibrating in response to the music that shook the world around him and he remembered her talk of waves, of seeing reality like a pool that you could swim throughout, changing the pattern of the waves with the stroke of your hand, because the universe was not ruled by being acting upon being, but by an infinite sea of matter and energy, connected even in the vacuum between the stars. And there was a sound ... the sound of the beginning of the universe, the wave of creation ... “ Om Ma Ni Pe Me Hum ... Om Ma Ni Pe Me Hum ... Om Ma Ni Pe Me Hum ...” It was a chant for compassion, someone knew.

And as she looked at him with sorrow in her eyes, understanding the suffering that was this existence, and wishing that she could put an end to it while knowing that she could not. And then she said it, words that wrapped around him like the warm breeze blowing in off the sea to make her sigh in her sleep as he looked out at the stars: “Release your burden.” He wanted to. He wanted to more than ever before.

And a voice ... burning in him, opening this mouth, moving this jaw, so foreign. “Why?” Someone said. A long time ago he asked her the same thing. Now, he had no more questions to ask. Now, he was only waiting for the answer, just one of them.

“Metta. Vipassana.”

“Huh?”

“Compassion. Wisdom. You want to feel, don’t you? You want to stop chasing after illusions that will never satisfy.”

He felt this body nod.

“Then release your burden. Let me be your guide.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because you, like every other being, hopes that there will come an end to your suffering.”

“And what is it you want me to do?”

“Come and see.”

And he felt himself take a step forward, a step towards her. He had been taking steps like this one for an eternity, never getting closer until now. It was a step like any other mortal step: a step forward in time ...

... The walls of the cell were gray cinderblock and the bars were cold, but not rusty. It was like any other prison he could imagine, whether in movies of spies and espionage or the latest cop show. It was like Chicago or Detroit or the military brigs he used to sneak down to, just to know that he could. The only difference was that this time, he was inside.

He wondered what difference that made at all. Was there really and inside and an out? When did one meet the other? And could they exist independent of each other? But here it did not matter, because they could take your physical freedom away, but your mental freedom always remained here in this place. You got time alone to think whatever thoughts you desired, and as long as you stayed confined, they could care less what you did. They’d even let you hang yourself.

He’d lived in a mental prison all his life, groomed to paint within the lines, to strategize and calculate, never to just think. So he leaned against stone, colder than bone but warm enough to melt the excruciating numbness that had imprisoned his mind for so long.

Here he was, breaking the rules.

Not that he hadn’t before. But this was the first time he had ever gotten caught. Counting cards in Hong Kong ... there was a lot they could do to a man for that. Not that he was a man ... he was still so young, and he felt the age like a cloak, waterlogged and weighing him down when it should be warm and feather-light. He didn’t know what to do ... only that this had happened ... was happening ... would happen again.

He knew what happened after this. They would release him, with a harsh smack to the cheek that left his vision blurry for days and barely understood warnings to never do this again. He would always wonder why he got off so easily.

But he would get off, so he lay back against the cold surface of the stone bench, folding his awkward, lanky frame as best he could. This was all wrong somehow, and his consciousness throbbed, the way his head did in the flight simulator - his reflexes too quick for the computer interface, the incongruity making him airsick.

But the echo of water dripping somewhere and the harsh mumbling of other drunken casino detainees in the background ... they fit. So did the dank smell that symbolized oppression, when in reality it was just apathy, the unwillingness to clean a place for the unclean, an unwillingness to care. What was wrong then? That it had all come before?

Then he heard the familiar clank of the cell door opening. But it was not the angry Chinese manager in the suit and glasses, with fingers thick like sausages and trembling jowls that rumbled like the earth moved. Instead the figure was lanky but muscular with eyes that took in everything and let nothing out - the abyssal black of a soldier. His hair was tied back into ponytail and his clothes were unfamiliar, not just out of place for China in the 1980s but for the Earth, for the millennium. A cream colored vest cut across his chest, exposing a tattoo on his shoulder, done in impossible colors, knots tied elegantly around his arm, looking almost real, and giving even more the sense that this man was bound ... attached.

“What do you want?” He asked the stranger, scared more by his familiarity than even his intimidating presence.

“I want what it is we all want.”

“What’s that?”

“And end to suffering.”

He tried to smirk, to summon a confidence he knew he must once have had ... will have had. He had stared into the faces of demons and given the same cavalier grin. The man’s face was a mask, but he could tell by the eyes that he could do nothing to fool him. “What’s in it for me?”

“The same.”

He laughed, even though by the intensity with which this man seemed to marshal reality around him but the very brightness of his focus. He did not want to believe him. His trust had been betrayed far too many times by promises of grandeur, or even promises of happiness, dreams violently shattered. “And I should believe you because?”

“Because you want to love. And you want to know.”

“But is that enough?”

“It has to be ...

... he knew this place. He had seen it in dream and in reality. He had seen it overrun by brambles black like the night, covered in etching paper and scientific equipment, a familiar voice babbling in the background. He had seen it from the air, looking hauntingly familiar.

He had seen it when ... no, that had not been him. But he had been there, her kneeling beside him, a brilliant teal collar around her neck and so much love in her eyes. And now she was sitting, hand in his, brilliant eyes looking on him with an expression approaching pity but never reaching it.

“If love is attachment, then how can attachment be wrong?” he asked.

“Because it is attachment that ties us to this plane of existence, to this suffering, to samsara. Attachment is greed and jealousy, it is grief and hunger and malice. It is resistance to the change that is the inevitable tide of the world. Wouldn’t you like to be free of that? You would not need to suffer with the fickle will of fortune, just watch it calmly from above. It is our attachment to what happens and what does not -ideals, events, lives- that causes us to suffer, not the events themselves. The universe is not out to get us. Can’t you see that? The universe is grand. And we can share in its wonder if we just let go.”

“If this is the fashion these days then I don’t want any part of it. I’m a soldier, Padmapani, not a philosopher.”

She smiled benevolently, almost patronizingly. On anyone else he would have considered that smile a mutiny against his position, but on her he could only see it as a gift. “It’s not a philosophy. The evidence is irrefutable. The technical theologians have more than proven it. Don’t you see? It’s a reality. We have the power. We all have it within ourselves to transcend this plane of existence and its sufferings to find something greater. Peace. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Doesn’t every being want to escape suffering?” She spoke with such conviction, such light dancing in her eyes, that he wanted to believe.

But he could not let go. Everything he was ... everything he felt for her was telling him that this was all some great mistake. “I’ve been fighting all my life. To think that it has all been for nothing ... To know that all I had to do was walk away ...”

Someone, sometime, would say, ‘Mankind would rather have the void as his purpose than be void of purpose.’

She smiled at him, and he wanted so much to believe. “It is not walking away. It is letting down all barriers.”

“But, why?”

“Nibbana.” The syllables tumbled like a cool rain through the parched ground of his soul, cleansing like the great oceans of their planet, dislodging the hatred and the violence of a life spent at war with an unstoppable enemy. For these ... these Wraith, showed them all what the metaphysicians and technical-theologians saw in the laboratory and the microscope. They were the proof of the evils of attachment ... the hunger ... the wasted quality of their pale skin. They were ghosts. Ghosts condemned to everlasting hunger, because their attachment could never be consummated.

Looking at her now, resplendent in her flowing white gown, flowers in her hair, he wondered if the flame of his own attachment could ever be quenched. He wondered how he could ever consent to love all with the same passion he loved her.

“Promise me,” he said.

“Promise you what?”

“Promise me that whatever happens ... whether or not we both end up ascending from this world of suffering or not, that we won’t ... that we’ll still love each other. That we won’t forget what it’s like to love like this.”

“I don’t know what it will be if we succeed ...” She looked down at those delicate hands, biting her lip in an uncharacteristic display of doubt. She was always so sure of herself ... even when she made mistakes, she was righteous in her determination.

“Promise me that you won’t forget. Promise me you won’t betray this.”

When she looked up again, her eyes were bright, more transcendent even though layer upon layer of worry painted into the shadows that began to lurk around the edges.

“I promise.”

And then, John Sheppard knew what he had to do.

He had to open his eyes. He no longer felt much pain, just a familiar weariness. He remembered this feeling from a long time ago - it was submission. But was submission really all that bad when the cause was just? You could become too attached to freedom, after all. And he had ... no, he still wanted, to release his burden.

He looked up at a familiar patch of ceiling, sighing. He was back in the infirmary. And somebody was holding his hand. That somebody squeezed and, somewhere, he found the energy to squeeze back.

“John?” It was Elizabeth, voice deep and so full of questions ... so full of compassion.

He nodded, throat too parched to speak, and too weak to turn his head to look at her.

“Here.” She brought an ice chip up to his lips. He must have been out for a while for his mouth to be this dry. But he tried to smile through cracked lips, to give her the hope he knew she needed.

“What ...” He closed his eyes as the room spun just a little. He was so weak, but there was something else in him now, a drive, a directive. All his life, he’d wondered why he was here. Why he had to keep pushing, keep trying when there was a part of him that desperately wanted to lay down his arms and surrender. He’s seen so much suffering ... so much death, he’d begun to believe that there was no end to it, even as he kept plugging ahead, aimlessly striking out into the void. But now he knew.

Now he had a purpose.

“You had a seizure, John. Carson ... Rodney’s working on something. It’ll be okay.” She squeezed his hand again, but her palms were clammy, and her hands cold and shaking like doubt. “I just need you to hold on a little bit longer.”

John wanted to believe that. But he knew it wasn’t true. They both did. He couldn’t go on living like this. His body was weak and his mind was losing cohesion. And there was time ... here in this world of suffering they always worried about time, because time was the meter of change.

He nodded, but his words betrayed his true thoughts. “When I was in Antarctica, there was this guy. He was one of the guys that’d been down there for so long, they just couldn’t get rid of him, you know? The pilots with the long scraggly hair and the beard? He got kicked out after he served up in Thule for four consecutive tours. Came down to McMurdo as a civilian, flying supply planes. He loved the cold.”

He saw Elizabeth’s confused face hovering above him, but she was smiling encouragingly. She probably thought this was some drug-induced, death-bed ramble.

“People get like that ... they fall in love with the numbness. They fall in love with the detached beauty that will kill you in hours left out there alone in the cold. I read every major exploration account of Antarctica and they all have one thing in common ... once they saw it, experienced it, even after they saw people lost to it, none of them could ever fully go back to the world. A part ... a part stays.”

“John, do you feel ...” She frowned, a small crinkle forming in her brow. He was tempted to laugh at the expression.

“So this guy ... he told me that if he somehow found out that he had two weeks to live or something, he’d catch a flight up to Greenland, the arctic cap, walk out into a blizzard and wait for a polar bear to hunt him down. They’re the only animals that will still hunt man, you know. That whole thing about tigers in Siberia was wrong. He said you had to respect that, you know? There’s some beauty in it ... like the arctic. There’s something more ...” He coughed, and Elizabeth helped him to sit up until it passed, leaving his lips tinged with blood. They both ignored it as he wiped it with the back of his hand. There was nothing they could do. “There’s something more to it all than just survival.”

Elizabeth’s frown deepened. She was used to the language of politics, he knew. She could read between the lines. “Major ... John, you’re not honestly suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you?”

He smiled, putting on his best mask of confidence for her. In fact, it wasn’t a mask. He knew this was right. “I’m just telling a story, Elizabeth.”

He let his eyes drift, the world getting fuzzy around the edges, but somehow letting him take more in that way, the way an impressionist painting showed more emotion, suggested more than it actually depicted. That’s when he noticed the choker around Elizabeth’s long neck. She looked even more regal than he had always imagined.

Even as she sat fidgeting uncomfortably under the intensity of his gaze, she looked more confident then ever. But maybe that was just time playing with him again. He had seen this before ... done it before in the whispers of memory. He wondered what it would be like in a world where one did not bother to measure change. Would time exist there?

“You’re wearing it?”

A slight blush graced her cheeks and she looked down at her hands, letting the image of the leader slip just a little. “I ... actually, I can’t get it off. Rodney thinks it’s because I don’t have the gene ... but he was the one who wanted me to put it on to begin with ... I don’t know why I ...”

He smiled warmly, and she looked almost suspicious of it. “Come here.”

“Are you sure?” They’d never crossed that line into touch. It wasn’t just the structure of command either. He wasn’t a very tactile person. He wasn’t constantly patting his men on the back or giving them high fives or anything. In fact, the last time he remembers doing that, it was to cover up the fact that he was dead on his feet and needed Rodney to help him back to the jumper.

And Elizabeth ... Elizabeth was what some people called a ‘cold fish.’ But he knew better. She was one of the most compassionate, caring people that he knew. And she was more like him then any of them liked to believe. They both held back because it was easier to love no one, if loving everyone was too hard. He could see the fear in her eyes ... the fear that he would touch her somehow, and then he would die and she would not be able to go on.

But he reached out nonetheless, fingers guided by genetics, molecules, trends, emotions built over millennia sending his body thrilling as his hands clamped down around the mesmerizing teal jewels of the choker.

And then he felt it ... a warmth, a wonder at the new that had stopped being wonderful to him so long ago, a caring, a deep desire to protect, a jaded optimism, a sadness, a feeling of impotence, and hope, buried deep beneath it all.

These feelings were not his own. Looking her face, relaxed, but determined, there was no doubt to whom they belonged. But then ... she looked shocked. She must be feeling him too. He gasped, almost releasing her, afraid of the intimacy of it all. But he forced his hands to remain as she spoke, voice heavy and choked. “John, please don’t go.”

He forced his mind deeper, forced the connection. His old reflexes would have told him to push away, to make sure that she didn’t know him well enough to truly miss him when he inevitably left, but now ... now, so much had changed. Now, he was ready. So he dug deeper, searching for some way to make her understand ...

“Please, Selena. New York’s the city that doesn’t sleep. There’s something for everyone there. And Columbia has a wonderful science department. You could apply next semester. I’m sure you’ll be a shoo-in.”

“No thanks, Lizzie, I prefer to be able to see the sky, thank you very much. And you know I don’t like all the ... people.”

Elizabeth chuckled, throwing her head back. “Alright then. Though I have always loved the city.”

“Then you should go there.” Selena looked straight ahead down the dirt path and into the morning fog that dusted everything in the botanical garden with dew, from the delicate petals of the orchids in the tips of Selena’s dark lashes. Why was she so determined to make this difficult? Couldn’t she see that Elizabeth cared more about her than she did about a place?

Elizabeth ignored the comment. “Washington D.C., then. It’s lovely there in the winter when it snows. The buildings in Georgetown look like little ginger-bread houses and my dad can probably get us an apartment for absurdly cheap, especially if we’re willing to live in Brookland.

“Elizabeth ...”

“Berkeley. There’ll be plenty of tree-huggers. You remember the street vendors and the African drumming society and the protests outside the University Center? And I know you loved California. Imagine, Big Sur right in our back yard. And the vineyards ... “

Selena stopped walking, turning towards Elizabeth, who wondered if she could taste the morning in the dew forming on those eyelashes if she pressed her lips against them. “Lizzie, you’re not listening to me. I’m not going with you. I told you that I’d stay until graduation. We graduated; now its time to move on with our lives.”

“I know that, Selena. But why can’t we move on with them together? It’s a big world; there must be some place in it where we can both be happy.”

“Come with me then.”

“You know I can’t. We’ll go to Washington. There are activist groups there. You can lobby. I hear that the EPA is still understaffed ... you could work for them.”

“They’re understaffed because it’s a joke! Lizzie, nothing’s going to change if the people in power have something to gain by maintaining the status quo. They need to have something to lose ...”

“Selena, you know I can’t condone violence.”

“Why, Elizabeth? The world is violence! People die. Wars are fought. Every organism that sustains does so at the expense of other organisms, even if all the damage it does is to eat.”

“Because human beings are more than that!”

“We wage war. And the politicians you seem to love so much condone it. What do you think they’re doing in Nicaragua as we speak? And what about our war against nature, Lizzie? It’s time that nature fought back, decreased the incentive. That’s what Earth Life Force is about ... I know you could never understand ... but war is the state of nature, and this is a war I have to fight.”

“Because it’s not war, Selena. It’s terrorism.”

“Human beings provoked it.”

“We have not declared a war ...”

“Why must we declare one?”

“Because the state has the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within its boundaries ... and without the state ... without laws and guidelines, Selena, it would be war. It would be the war of all against all.”

“That’s called survival, Lizzie.”

“But there’s an alternative to violence, Selena.”

Selena sighed, blowing a stray strand of hair back from her face. “What’s that?”

“Love.”

And Elizabeth leaned in, sealing the argument with a kiss.

But it was not enough.

Because the next day, lying on the side of Elizabeth’s narrow bed and deep in the space in her heart that would never quite heal, was the note, crisp and clean, too harsh and angular for this world of soft curves and supple bodies. The script was messy, but legible in a swirly, strangely-deliberate sort of way. It read:

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea,

Night lie before and behind me night,

And God within far Heaven refuse to light

The consolation of the dawn for me,

Between the shadowy burns of Heaven and Hell

It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell

With memory.

Elizabeth gasped, pulling away. The intimacy of the moment almost overwhelmed the pain of the memory, but even years later, the wound still lay open. John knew this. He knew what it was like to wonder what things would have been like if it all were different. It seemed as though things happened to you. It seemed as though every burden, every suffering, every mistake, could be blamed on that great big otherness that seemed to swallow the meager self like a sea. But now ... now he knew that wasn’t true. There was no separation, not really. The world bled into you because it was you that brought experiences, and let them change you. And you changed the world with even the most minute of decisions. That was karma. It wasn’t like some great cosmic tally board. It was that lives had a path, goal in sight or not. Each was equally unique and improbable, and it was people that breathed meaning into them even as they lived them.

His pain, Elizabeth’s pain, the pain of this being, long dead but not forgotten, were all the same in the end. Suffering, that’s what brought them together - the desire to find love and hold onto it forever, against the very nature of love as something brilliant only because of its impermanence.

But he still had to believe. They had all waited eternities for this moment - a moment where it seemed possible that love could conquer all. And that was the nature of this plane of existence ... where the world was only a dream that could be changed by those with imaginations powerful enough. It was their duty to dream of purity and hope for fulfillment. And so he had to go.

He pulled his hands away, and the collar came off with them, teal jewels almost winking as he lay them down beside his bed.

Elizabeth grasped his hand tight, nodding as she stood to leave. He saw the sadness in her eyes, and the compassion. He respected her more now than ever in a time when the words she had been so well trained to speak had melted away. He wanted to reach out to her, let her feel what it was to be held in the arms of someone who cared deeply about you one last time. He wanted to speak, but he could not because he knew that the only words they would have for each other would have to be a goodbye.