by Amanda Brend
I blink and breathe in, a waking child to newness once again and realise I am back in the void. I’m in the impasse, the space between the light and the world of form. In this place I am neither one or the other. I am not of light and air and I am not of blood and bone. Yet I can hear the ghosts of each echoing through me. I feel my friends enticing me back to the light, causing me to yearn for them. And I hear the spectres of the future pulling me with the seduction of viscera towards the task must I must fulfill.
Their unfamiliar tones are murmuring together in unison, deep and gentle, laughter in a humanity, different from mine. They are Men. Strong and pleasing voices. I do not think they are cruel and possibly I think they may even be delicate beings. I am siting in my formlessness a few yards from them. I put my tongue to the night, to the air and the spirits of life and I drink it all in. I feel my luck and I wish they would never stop, their warm humanity and chatter reach out and the molecules of me jump.
There are moments between the worlds when you can catch the absolute truth of everything. But mostly the times mean that you do not. I am making my best to catch it now, the realness in the spaces, the truth. Then the voices stop suddenly, and for a moment I wonder if I am found. But they don’t notice me. I cannot exactly see the people from whom the voices spring, I only hear their easy engagement with each other. Perhaps because I don’t understand them, I feel their beauty, perhaps if I knew what they said I would not. For in the world where they are, where am going, there are many vile things.
I came before on a night such as this, warm and littered with stars, I was born. Now I float in the undercurrent, waiting to draw breath, to be human once more. I hold my wound. Each time I am here it is different.
***
So I wait, filtered between grass and spread particle to the moon. If I could go back, to stay in the light with my friends I would. In the place where I’m not alone, together with nothing to separate us, I am happy there. But I made a promise, a promise to return and one I have to honor eventually. Every so often my heart is breaking with weight of it. Separation. Each time I am born just to be alone, and I am unable to get back to where want to be. Some call it a scar. But it isn’t, for it never heals completely. It is a wound that with each new life opens again. Without it, I could not function in the world and it would be the worse for me. This aloneness is the wound that I carry, and is the means by which I heal and have purpose. For if don’t feel, how might I understand the other and the various wounds they hold. As surely where am going, there are many of those.
But now the voices are going much to my sadness, I put my ears to the sky as they leave. If only they knew how perfect they were, in their miss shaped forms, miss shaped minds, each so pure that they could never imagine that they are the source of everything. I’m holding on to each one, as they walk, but they have a while since moved on to their business whatever it was.
Sometimes while you wait here in the impasse, there is screaming, awful screaming. And sometimes I see terrible horrors, so much terrible, that my heart explodes. You can see it all, stretched out in front of you, the possibilities like a moving picture. So much waste. It’s the blindness that makes them do these things. And It’s the blindness that beckons me, to do what I am bound.
The ironic thing is, once I become form again I forget everything. Can you believe it? Everything. My purpose, identity and mission, forgotten utterly. Until I see a sign, a consequence that sooner or later prompts me to dive into the longing that leads me towards the truth. Towards who I really am. Then often I only see a glimmer, a light, that sometimes I ignore. Ignored often for years and to my dismay, even lifetimes pass without following that light. And eventually when I do follow, sometimes even then it is not enough.
The last time it was not enough. I chose not to stay in that hard uncompromising world. And, I know they will not let me do that again, even if the separation becomes too much to bear. The last time, I was found in a car, with a friend amid the heat of summer, peppered with flies, and the sheet metal around us kissed by plant, soil and moss. I could not have done it alone. So I took a friend. We drank and took pills that made us happy, then we secured the ventilation, connected the pipe and we left, we left, what we couldn’t cope with. The only thread that pulled at me as I split from my body was the one that was cast out by my mother. Delicate, beautiful, so kind even, that I believe the core of her understood and could not stop me in the end. I’d tried by then to leave so many times before obviously.
But now I owe myself, I owe her and I will find my way. I will get out at the stop that takes me close to her and I will tell of the light and the things that are always there, I will bring her strength and joy and share the knowledge of existing. Together. Between the open wound and the chaos of the cars and the noise of the television sets, the politicians who lie and the wars that are waged. The children that cry and wander parentless, the floods that ravage the plains and make mud flats out of the ground. Disasters, fire, bombs and the men, the men that hold guns that plough the beauty of flesh, splintering into a fabric of blood the people that had just been there. All the topsy-turvy inside out, convoluted thinking caused by the blindness. The continual, ill-met decisions of so many each day, blind to your brilliance, blind to your beauty and dignity, to the fantastic tinkling of the heart. Blind to your idiosyncratic marvelous ways and the simple-ness of your love and hope. Bound in a blissful parcel of ignorance. I will come and I will show her, that it is all bigger and more stunning than both of us and any wound that would be carried. And that even then, yes, It’s worth every moment. I promise.
***
Of course, I’ll forget all this once I’m there. This, pact. Hidden by a plaque, that descends buried under humus. Lying there, still, expectant. And I’ll never know why I have to forget just to find it again. Though I suppose there are some mysteries of the universe you can never know, even when you are aware of them.
But now I ready myself to be able to feel the blueness of the sky, the smell of the summer in the trees and the rain against my body. I will toddle as an infant, stand tall as an adult, and bend over again as I age. I will hear the yawning of airplanes, and the twittering of school time, bear the sorrow of the world in my heart. I’ll cry when I am alone and cheer when I see others. I will yearn and yearn for my home and not know where that is. I will search and search and make many mistakes in the looking. I’m sure, I will make as many hurts as I feel. But this time I will not retreat. If there is one thing I know to do with this moment of preparation it is to engrave this one thing, this one thing that underneath all the smudge of what is called reality, the absolute truth lies, a pulsar in the depths. So that I may find it once more when I am lost, bring it out and delight, a jewel in the sun, miraculous.
Now I can hear them calling me. I hear their panting and caressing, fumbling at one another in the dark. Hasty and erratic, then gliding, rising and falling, opening and closing and on this occasion slightly drunk I think. The makers of me, my mother, my father, sticky with the heat, coupling, uncoupling and entirely unaware of what I will bring to them, to the world.
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