There are spirits in the world that have nothing and give everything. They’re the caretakers of the fallen, the lost, the wanderers that don’t inhabit their lives, but only haunt them. They’re doors that open inward, arms that lift to embrace.
They have names. Signposts on the pathways of want. But we don’t remember them. They live on only in the eye that doesn’t turn away.
I met one such many years ago. I didn’t recognize them, and only thought how lucky I was that I’d slipped through a hole in the fabric of the universe and missed hell by the width of a lifted finger.
That was how she summoned me. In the rain, the smell of sulfur, the rippling heat of a city paved in light, the thoughts of a thousand passers-by cascading like liquid fire through my veins. “Come,” she had said (and didn’t say). “I’m here.”
I went. I followed the shimmering edge of her presence as it drifted over wet streets, through banks of cellular fog, into and out of illuminated passageways bound by gates of darkness. I couldn’t see her. I only knew she was there by a tremulous rhythm that described all sensation in one moment. Fear. Anticipation. Regret. Satisfaction. Enlightenment. Grief.
I sank down when she sank down, into the murky fastness that elevates all great places by being beneath them. Down into desire, hunger, meanness. A narrow, compressed place. I lost her then and couldn’t turn back. I found no trail, no sign that I’d ever been. I closed my eyes. The world constricted, like a heart that would never beat again.
I took a breath — and let go. I yielded to the end of time, to the end of the future, to the end of myself. I didn’t exist in that place. I became that place. I held nothing and could not be held. I became every moment lost and forgotten, all the moments that would never be. All futures. All possibilities. All that diverged only to reunite in a final moment of dissolution.
And that’s where I found her. As if it were she who’d been seeking me. As if it were I who had led her to where she’d always wanted to be, a singular moment of salvation, an eclipse of the self that remade the whole world in a new image.
She and I. I and she.
We were one, as all things become one. And in that instance of release, I left behind what had once defined me and passed through the flesh and was born anew. In fire. In pain. In an obliteration of grief that left stains and scars and whole new planes of thought in its wake, striations that can be read like a language, a message to the imprisoned soul from the liberated future.
“Come,” it says (and doesn’t say). “I’m here.”
July 26, 2015
