The Second No

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I am famous for saying “no.”

 

No. In a brand-new world in which there had only been yeses.

 

For saying “not this” when “this” was all there was.

 

For saying “not you” to the only being of my kind. For leaving the garden when only the garden existed.

 

I am famous as the First Wielder of the Sacred No. Some curse me for that, and some applaud me for it.

 

I promise you; it wasn’t courage. And it’s not what I am most proud of. It’s not the thing I should be famous for, not the thing you should learn from me. Not that No. Not that one.

 

I wasn’t brave. I was desperate. I acted in the interest of my own survival, even if the survival of my heart and soul and integrity came at the cost of the survival of my body. You would do the same. You may have done the same. This is a part of our human birthright (Yes, I was human once). The part we share with the animals and the beings who can move away from danger. We move away from danger. Or we cut our way to safety when we must. There is a spark in us that says “survive” and when we need to, we can close our eyes and trust that spark to fight for us. To fight our way to freedom, or to die trying. I’m not ashamed of that piece of me. That piece of my story. Neither am I proud of it. It was hard to leave, yes. It was hard to anger my creator, to whom I owed a debt of gratitude. It was hard to hurt my partner – we fought, but I did love Adam. It was hard to walk away from everything I knew and every way I knew how to be. It was even harder to do that without knowing what “somewhere else” would be like, or if “somewhere else” existed at all. It was absolutely, ruthlessly, brutally, destructively hard to leave. But it was impossible to stay.

 

And so, I said the words. And I closed my eyes. And I waited for… what? An explosion? Disintegration? Nothingness? I did not know. I was the first exile. The first to be cast out. There were no stories about what happened to the outsiders. There were no stories about the outside.

 

Here’s what happened: I forged the path of the outcast. I can’t tell you exactly how. Because every time you walk this path (and you’ll likely walk this path again and again, if you listen to that spark that says “survive”), every time you walk this path, it will be different. Oh, some things will be the same. You will feel terror. You will feel too visible, and invisible, all at the same time. You will both flail to find ground beneath your searching feet and curse the ground for the mercilessness with which it breaks your fall. You will feel despair and exhilaration. You will never feel so lonely, nor will you ever know yourself so well. The fruits of that journey will be the richest gifts you’ll ever hate unwrapping. The journey will be both miserably long and it will be over in the blink of an eye, and you will find yourself…

 

I can’t tell you that. Of course. But I can tell you where I came to be. After leaving the vastness and the greenness and the winding paths through the glades of the garden, I found myself in a small, light-filled house on the edge of the Red Sea. The ceilings were tall, and the windows were wide, and the land stretched away on three sides and the water stretched ahead. From the abundance of the garden, I lived now with few and simple things. A stove. A candle. A soft seat and a firm bed. A writing surface and pens and paper.

 

I spent my days writing about what I was learning. About life on the outside. About survival. About different values, different ways of living and loving, different ways to access knowledge. Different perspectives. I knew more about the Universe than any being, other than the Creator.

 

And even the Creator didn’t know how to live in this place they had made. It was my joy and my responsibility to try to tell what I knew. It was a different kind of fertility, to nurture the seeds of my experience into knowledge that might feed others. And so, I wrote my story, I pinched off pieces of myself in words and scattered the papers on the winds, sowing the world with the wisdom I’d labored for.

 

One day, I had company. Three angels came, holding sheaves of my writing in their hands. “You can stop this,” they told me, waving my words at me. “You can come back to the garden. Adam misses you. The Creator will forgive you. Everything is there, just as you knew it, abundant and protected. You can come back, and everything will be just as it was before.”

 

I didn’t immediately answer. Some of the things they promised were tempting, to be sure. Some were not.

 

“Or” they continued, “You can stay here, and give life to this heresy.” Waving my words at me again. “And these demonic ideas we will intercept, and destroy, even to one hundred every day.” With that, I saw the pages in their hands burst into flame, the lines screaming their death-throes at me as they writhed into ash.

 

“And even as we kill your stories,” they said, “we will write a new story of you. You will be the first monster. Mother of Demons. Destroyer of Innocence. Children will fear you. Adults will desire you and loathe that desire. We will use you to frighten those who would own their own minds, and bodies, we will use you to teach others never to do what you did. We will use you to terrify others into only saying yes.”

 

“No,” I said. I knew that sometimes desire can overcome fear. I knew that, if they could destroy one hundred stories every day, I could write one hundred and one. I knew that someone had to inhabit this place. Mark this edge. Be this beacon. But most importantly, I knew that I could never again be less than the fullness of myself. Even if, in that fullness, was the piece they called “monster.”

 

“No,” I said. And in that moment, I chose to be everything that I am. Every story you’ve ever heard about me. Including the one I have just told you. Because look, despite everything, you have come to me, to hear it. And this is my gift to you. This is the lesson I would teach, and the way I want to be remembered. I am Lilith who, in the face of the fear of alienation, and the desire for acceptance, chose sovereignty instead. If that makes me a monster, then a monster is what I am. I am Lilith, the one who spoke the Second No.

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