The Cloister of the Dispossessed

“If you find a love that is possessive, then you must dispossess that love, for love is neither to be possessed nor possessed by.”

The cloister seethed in the harsh setting sun, drinking in Bellerose’s recurrent philosophy in a dazed stupor. They drank this rant again and again, for there was rarely water to drink.

“Love does not divide agency between the bearers. Love is a dispossessed freedom unknowable, yet profoundly known.”

They drank this rant again and again, for the heat of the days evaporated their memories. They lived each day born again in Bellerose’s love.

“I know this possessive love. I carry it in my flesh for you. I wear the stigma on my body to save you the scars of your soul.”

Bellerose gestured, once again, to the locket hanging round his neck. The metal had seared the flesh over his chest, leaving heart-shaped scar tissue; A product of wearing it through the constant journey that the cloister took across the burning orange desert. Bellerose peeled it from its cavity and took care to let it glint in the sun. The cloister responded with vague and thirsty admiration.

“My love for you is dispossessed. My love for you all is the release from the possessive love from above and below. My love for you will see us through these endless sands.”

Despite the constant sun-driven amnesia, the cloister instinctively knew this marked the end of the rant and, thus, the end of the walking day. The cloister yawned and settled, as did I, but I was dispossessed of them. I was dispossessed of Bellerose, too, though he did not yet know.

I remember when Bellerose made sense to my mired mind. I came to him, as we all did, to ask his permission to love. A Wanderer recently acquired into our cloister had begun a wordless, primordial courtship with me and some other members of the cloister. He was scraggly, young, and still feral. I gave to him the cloth that Bellerose gave to me, so that the Wanderer may cover his face and neck from the grating winds. Bellerose had loved me for many nights prior, but I had thought to display my dispossession with this new member. I had approached Bellerose, hands linked with the Wanderer. Bellerose grew into a heated silence at my request, grimacing at the cloth round the Wanderer’s neck.

He sent me and much of the cloister away to scavenge for cacti, though there were none in sight. The Wanderer remained with Bellerose and he avoided my request. I entered the wild desert with a steady apprehension, wondering how I might find the Wanderer once more. There would be three reunions with the Wanderer.

I first found the Wanderer again mangled, half-buried in the sand. Bellerose’s hands dripped with the evidence of his violence. I felt the first true sting of dispossession. Bellerose was able to quell these thoughts for a time with his magnetic cadence and words.

“Too wild, too dangerous,” said Bellerose, “We no longer have the awful convenience of possessive loves within many communities to teach us to be people. This poor creature did not have the protection from scars as you do.”

Bellerose did not love me that night, or any subsequent night, and I found the Wanderer a second time in my dreams. He led me to a pool of water where I drank deeply of my reflection. Each greedy gulp diluted Bellerose’s so-called dispossessed love. I began to feel a self-possession I had not had since my days of angry and hungering savagery. The time before Bellerose and his cloister. I began to recognize my memories, and they no longer dissipated under the sun. The Wanderer’s truly dispossessed love showed me Bellerose’s own possessive variety.

I do not know how many miles we had walked in the desert from the Wanderer’s body before I actualized my voice. I know it was long enough that even Bellerose’s memory must have lost him. But, eventually, I, too, began to speak my philosophy.

“Bellerose is possessed of love. He is locked like his locket to us, while we are open to him.”

My chapped and bleeding lips spelled his hypocrisy.

“His dispossession is only for that of jealousy for those freed from his own scars. He is the knife that wounds.”

My rasping voice desperately reached out to the cloister. Their sand encrusted-eyes lay warily upon me, a morbid curiosity alighting their minds. I did not have the experience or gravitas to speak as Bellerose did; I only had the truth.

“I do have a possessive love. It is a possessive love for myself. Bellerose sought to replace that, and he did for a time. I bear the scars, we all bear the scars.”

A dry kind of sobbing wracked my body. I heaved but no tears came, and my throat caught. Bellerose looked at me with an inscrutable gaze. There was not a simmering rage or an aspect of disappointment to his expression. I could only read a pensive surprise.

That evening, Bellerose ended the walking day without his usual rant. The cloister tittered with unease, their heat-addled minds grasping at routines. We were a score strong and must have wandered with Bellerose long enough that those that were once starving children were now lithe adults. Perhaps a dozen of them settled around me now, forming an expectant audience in the vacuum of Bellerose’s speech. My voice cracked, and my words felt forced as I eked out a contrived pittance, though my confidence grew as I went on. I felt myself speaking like Bellerose for it was his voice I knew more than my own.

“Long we have wandered behind the man with the heart-shaped token to match his heart-shaped scars. Those scars formed in time in the beating sun. Our scars have formed in the same fashion. Bellerose’s own radiance has indeed scarred us. If we are truly the cloister of the dispossessed, then where are we going? Where is it that Bellerose seeks to free us? No, there is no destination but the prison of his love, the prison of this desert.”

The cloister before me looked upon me with recognition that had long been lost to their eyes. Bellerose watched from a distance, his remaining loyal cloister huddled behind him without comprehension. When the night fell, Bellerose came to me as I lay awake in my tent.

“Never was it my intention…” Bellerose gave a false start. “I have borne your burdens of possessive love. Great men once loved this earth with a selfish desire to own it, and it was they that scorched it with flame, and left the world of people who travel the wastes. The wastes of that possessive love. Do you not see? My scars are…” Bellerose didn’t seem to know how to finish. “At sunrise, I will sate the cloister’s needs. It is clear that love has changed hands. You no longer need worry about my dispossessed love.” Bellerose exited my tent, pulling at the locket around his neck. I could see the pain in his face of tearing flesh, as his scars had once again healed around it.

The cloister once more prepared to begin the walking day, though the events of the night prior had divided them. Half looked to me to decide the direction, and half looked to Bellerose. I thought to speak, but Bellerose preempted me.

“We are at a crossroads of dis-union, my cloister of dispossessed. So, then, we must now find our union once more,” Bellerose was no longer wearing his locket. He approached me with closed fist and anger in his eyes.

“The responsibility of reconstruction belongs to the survivors… So, now we reinstate the great institution of love and unions,” He opened his palm to reveal the locket, and slipped the chain around my neck. He pressed the trinket into my chest. It had not absorbed the heat of the day, so it was cool, but also unctuous from the pieces of Bellerose still clinging to it.

“This marriage reunites our schismed cloister. The bearer of the trinket shall be the speaker. I shall continue to guide us through the desert. We shoulder the burden of possessive love together now.”

With finality and authority, Bellerose turned and began walking a direction in the desert. The cloister slowly and reluctantly followed. I, too, reluctantly began keeping pace behind the group, as far from Bellerose as I could be without losing the cloister. I didn’t know how to process this development. I felt as though I had come close to escaping only to now feel the branding of Bellerose seeping into my flesh. Several times I caught members of the cloister looking behind at me. An expression resembling a futile concern took their faces for moments, and then they would look away in shame.

It would be many days before I found the words that belonged to me again. We shepherded the cloister, Bellerose at front, and I behind, for these days until I found the Wanderer for the final time.

His face and body were unrecognizable bones and gnawed flesh. But the cloth round his neck was surely my final gift. His identity was unmistakable. From his corpse, I rendered my voice again.

“See, now Cloister. There is no direction but Bellerose’s possession. See the corpse not only as Bellerose’s acts of jealous love. See it now, as a place we have once tread. See it now as the marker of imprisonment; We are not headed for a great destination. Bellerose means only to contain us so that we cannot leave him. Do you see it now, Cloister?”

I cast the locket in the sand, and saw that it had begun to burn my skin with blisters and pus. My rage was palpable, and more of the cloister looked to me with sanity returning. In an instant, Bellerose was on me. His hands went around my neck, dragging me into the sand. Sediment blinded me in the melee as I struggled against his grip. He bounced my head once against the ground, and was suddenly pulled off of me. The cloister rescued me and held him down. I rubbed my eyes free of the sand for what felt like an eternity, wishing to not open them to gaze upon Bellerose again. I saw him, struggling against the emaciated crowd, though he, too, was weak from years of dehydration and broiling in the sun. The cloister looked to me, asking with their eyes how to exact justice. What direction to take. A heavy sigh clutched at me before I spoke.

“Leave Bellerose. We are no longer possessed of his love, and our actions now and future will be without regard to him. Leave him by the Wanderer.”

I stood up independently. I remembered the direction that the Wanderer had come to us from here. We would trace back his step, and find where he came from.

“We are no longer the Cloister of the Dispossessed. We’ll be possessed by our own choices. And we’ll love in a truly free way.,” the words came naturally and were mine.

“We’ll find where the Wanderer came from. We’ll tell those that loved him what became of him.”

“What is to become of me? Who loves me that will know my fate?” pleaded Bellerose.

I did not answer him. I began walking away from this pitiful man.

“If you are then to dispossess me, then dispossess me,” Bellerose’s begging turned to a frothing petulance, “Take my life as you once loved me, all of you. If you are to commit this act of betrayal, then heed your commitment. I bare my heart freely for you to spill,” his palm clutched at his heart-shaped wound, a wild rage danced in his eyes, commanding the cloister to rise to his final challenge.

The hesitant few considered it, but in the end, they all followed me.