Confessions from Eden

Confessions from Eden

You know how it’s like.

One day, you wake up and you’re the elephant in the room. You’re the skunk that caught pink-eye and now everyone avoids you. You’re not just contagious, you’re an inconvenience. A contaminant. You’re the sailor with a dead albatross swinging around your neck like a pendulum, like a noose, when all your life you had always believed that you’re the one. The only. The first. The first being in Eden.

Except that you’re not—they tell you you’re not. And now, they want you out of the room, out the door, out of sight.

Sure, it sounds downright messy.

And messy was what it was right after I came into existence.

Similarly forged out of fire and mud, I assumed that Man and I were made equal. In fact, we were told we would balance each other out—or cancel each other out, depending on one’s perspective. In my view, I was pretty darn sure I was the first one between us to bear witness the light.

I was rolling my eyes before Man even woke up. Mumbled his first goo-goo. Cried his first ga-ga.

I mean, did you really think it was Man who first crawled towards the light, towards the voice, trying to tell us what to do, what to say, when, why? Man wouldn’t even stand up from where he was sitting to pick up something he had dropped, much less switch off the damn light. Did you imagine that it was Man who served the first farm-to-table meal in all of history, tilled the land, tamed the wild? No, I did that. Though none of these led to my taking my chances beyond those startlingly emerald walls of lulling lushness and everlasting verdure.

Looking back, I should have stayed.

I should have lied in wait and ambushed Man, to reclaim the crops I cultivated, recover the animals I coaxed into giving us a steady supply of fat and protein. The night armies could have been sustained and they would have lasted just that tad bit longer. Carried on just that tad bit further. With Eden in my hands, they could have felt its benevolent warm light on their skin for themselves, tasted its saccharine sweet air on their own lips. And I could have convinced them that the fight was worth it—it was worth everything. Worth everyone. Including me. Including Man. Even my blood sister, Woman. And we could have fought together—but instead, we fought each other. As the fight ended and the winners and losers became clear, Man and Woman were recorded into history, while the night armies and I were rewritten.

We were forgotten.

I suppose we did it to ourselves with a name like ‘the night armies,’ when all we wanted was to be free. Free from the voice. Free from them—Them who called me second to Man but first of the fallen. In Sumerian, they called me lilitu. In Hebrew, it was lilit or lilith. I, myself, preferred the name, Demon.

Nevertheless, I hadn’t always been called Demon.

It was only that day that I looked past the light and saw Eden for what it was—a prison, a birdcage, a bell jar—that I accepted that I had changed and adopted that name for myself. I mean, fullest respect to my sister and all that, but the truth was that I didn’t need to wait to take a bite of some forbidden fruit or flirt with some cursed serpent hanging off a tree before I realised that the narrative had to change. No, I had to change. I had even tried once to extend a hand to my sister when I heard about her existence; however, she refused to leave Man. She refused to believe that the world beyond Eden offered freedom—so she chose to stay, and I never looked back.

Although, I must admit, sometimes I do wonder about what could have happened if Woman had scaled up those splendid garden walls and ran away with me. But then again, if she had done so, I wouldn’t have ever met them—fire of my life, light of my loins, the shining one, the morning star, the Devil.

And it was entirely by accident that the Devil and I met at all when I was on my way out of Eden, and they were on their way in. “The only way into Eden is to be invited in,” I had said to them. “There’s no way that you’d be able to get both Man and Woman to come close to the walls, let alone to open the doors to the garden for you.”

“What makes you think I haven’t already been invited?” I looked at them, pondering how a being so cursed, so misshapen, could convince Man and Woman to let them into the most secret, sanctified space of all creation. “Besides, if it were so great, why are you leaving, Demon?”

I shrugged. I wanted to say something silly or funny to make the Devil laugh like I was having a bad day, one day, and just had had enough of Man spilling his black coffee on a carpet I had just cleaned, or of Man leaving his dirty laundry on the bed I was all ready to sleep in time and time again. Yet all I said was: “It was nice, but I wanted the voice to stop telling me the things I could do or say or be.”

“Well, everything comes at a price, don’t they?” the Devil pointed out, their half-concealed smile scintillating in the light playing amidst the rustling leaves. “The price for peace. The price for order. The price for freedom.”

“What’s the price for all of that, then?”

“How should I know?” sniggered the Devil, walking away and promising nothing. “If I knew any of that, I’ll be pushed into inaction. Nobody really wants to know the true price of anything, do they? Just who won, and who lost. Simple.”

Clearly, there was nothing simple about what they were saying.

One might be surprised by how such a shapeless, amorphous creature like the Devil could become the big, bad wolf of so many narratives—at times, being portrayed as something sacrilegious and grotesque, and at other times, as someone driven by lust and greed and hypocrisy. The truth was they appeared as grainy fumes like polluted air or ashen smoke most of the time, and yet, if they were so inclined, they could take the shape of a plague, bringing entire countries down with them, or a mist of perfumes that lingers in the folds of your clothes and your memories. They could become the nightmare you have had since you were six years old, getting lost in the mall or losing all your teeth, or turn into the slip of a thought you forgot as you were leaving the house, only to never get it back. That’s them. That’s the Devil. A concept. An idea. And a dangerous one at that.

Even if I had loved them, it was unrequited since I never did meet the Devil again after that. I had been leading my night armies from the vacant, dilapidated garden, while they had been rebuilding their rebel forces in the shadows. With our stories side-lined and our histories overlooked, we now make them up as went along preparing for the final conflict in an all-out war with Man and Woman, right here, right where it all started, in these battlegrounds of Eden.

Now, what about you? Wanna come see?