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So long ago, a millennium or more in your time, we evolved.

We rose out of the whirlpool of our world to achieve what your Buddhists call the release from attachment. Perfect detachment. Our physical form relaxed and withdrew to something of a higher vibration, a lesser physicality. We could move through dimensions, make your walls and fortresses nothing to our stride. Move through time and space by relativity, by thought alone.

But something was lost in this translation. Perhaps every evolution comes at a price. We did not realize. Your mystics that depict the soul’s journey as the snake swallowing its tail are nearer to the truth than they know. Or at least, evolution is circular, not linear. When you rise, you rise to a certain point – as we did – and then there is nothing but the descent. This must be traversed before any other evolution is possible. And this time, as we descend, there are pieces we cannot take with us, parts we have already lost, perhaps irrevocably.

You turn your gods to demons so easily, and in this you are wise. Perhaps it is inevitable. We lost the physical as we rose and thought little of it. So freed from its shackles, so sure in our perfection. But the physical has is secrets and its power. We should have known. We were like you, before. A child learns empathy through first feeling pain, or pleasure. Love is expressed most powerfully through touch and embrace. Without the physical we lost something greater, the capacity to feel.

Falling now, without emotion, makes us cruel, makes us relentless. And even this we only know in abstract and cannot experience directly. How much harder the ascent without this guiding star?

So we seek in you – in your limbs, your heart, your flesh – the elements of emotion. It is elusive. We find it not in sinew, nor in blood, nor even breath. Yet it is there. We feel and feed upon it – your fear, your love – even your hatred. In our sterile rooms we seek the palpable, the real. How do we give birth to this within ourselves, we who abandoned it so willingly and blindly? Where within you is this road back to the heart?

Knowledge is not the root of evil, forgetfulness is.

We appear to you, perhaps, as demonic, and this we are. Not by choice but by accident. By hubris. Like your Icarus, we flew too high, and now know only the descent.

Can you help us feel? Can you make us remember? And if you could, would you? I’m not even sure you should.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016