This is part 3 of a short fictional series. So far the posts are all in order… So far…
* * * * *
They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago. The jumper wire. How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy. The fuse of a self.
A short circuit.
It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation. Without access to the boundless panorama on either end of our existence, we’re just looping memories. Ghosts zooming around the accelerator, hungry for collisions. We’re rays of light, all bottled up– no distance in which to fly, no sun from which to spring.
And it hurts. It hurts awfully– in ways that seem little and ways that seem big– but in the end you realize: pain is pain. It simply hurts.
– – – – –
When I was halfway across the room I glanced to the window, looking for the sky. I saw the rectangle of light on the wall, the fuzzy glow of its edges. I felt the sincerity of my own movement, the grace of complete conviction. I was the day after the storm. A trespassing calmness. A freedom without roots.
I heard a car door slam somewhere down below. It felt close enough to touch, and the connection was immediate.
I hear you.
I am here, crossing this room.
This is my offering, my gift to you.
May you live. May you hunger and thirst no more.
One car door seemed a secret greater than I could carry. I took another step.
Though I was nearer now, just a step or two away, her breath was still undulating with the same easy rhythm. Two pillars of steam emerging rhythmically from the shadows. I felt a certainty of being that couldn’t be pinned on any one thought or feeling. I was certain of all of them. Of everything at once. All I had ever carried inside of me was tumbling out onto the floor, spilling over my banks.
One more step.
She had soft, bulging eyes. Black hooves. Her front knees were slightly hyper-extended. I reached out my hand and touched the bristled hair of her forehead, between her two short horns. (It was smooth in one direction, prickly in the other.) We joined in the darkness at that point of contact. We completed a larger circuit. She remained motionless, still waiting, her eyes unfocused, settled upon a point just above the floor.
I felt a gratitude difficult to explain. She had come for me. Across a great distance. Was this merging? I bent over and kissed her forehead lightly, and when I stood she sunk one of her horns deep into my side. It was a simple movement. Pure. She lowered her head and took a gentle step forward, impaling me. Then she stopped. She was not afraid. Not curious or apologetic. Not attacking or pushing me away. Just waiting again. For the next instruction.
I gasped and shuddered. My body knew instantly what this meant. Memories of a thousand deaths were instantly freed, and their fuzzy wings whisked across my face, blotting out the view. Fire shot through me, and I recoiled, staggering, not wanting to put any weight on the floor– wanting to just hover in the air. To pause time. To sit here for just a moment. To thank the one who had slammed the car door. To remember the squeak of snow beneath my shoes on the coldest day. To tell her—the one who had come for me—everything I had yet to tell.
I found myself on the floor. Motionless. My breath was rattling in my throat. I felt cautiously for the wound, needing to know, and winced when my hand came back sticky and warm. The clock in my head had already begun to tick in the background. (The fuse had been lit.) How deep was the wound? How much blood did I have? I thought it was something like six or seven pints.
How long before they came for me?
The answer came, and I told it to myself as if making an announcement to all affected parties. At least two more days, folks. They’d said three nights, maybe four. I swallowed hard. I was too hollow now to be concerned with what came next. Unable to track it, except for the logistics. They were still there, faithful to the end. Still taking stock. How many hours until infection sets in? The thirst alone will be catastrophic. How long until I pass out? Until the end? What will it be like?
How will Jesus and Hafiz ever get this carpet clean?
I imagined Hafiz lighting up like a sale sign at the idea of cold water. Yes! Better yet, a steam cleaner. A rental unit. Jesus driving the van, lurching over the potholes, one elbow on the door frame. Hafiz on the radio dial.
Let it come.
The voice came from inside of me, cutting through my numbness and delirium. I could see his eyes, like dancing flames, looking straight into me. Like he wasn’t buying it. This strange dilemma. My whimpering contortions. He was carrying me. Seeing through me and back out the other side. From wherever he was, he was holding everything in place, like the stillness at the core of a galaxy’s whirling gravity.
Hafiz was nearby, chanting.
I felt a glimmer, then, an inkling of the idea that this wasn’t everything it seemed. And then they left me once again. I laid alone on the floor, my blood clotting to the carpet, to my shirt, to the wound. Using my good side and one of my legs, I dragged myself across the floor and leaned my back against the couch. I took a sip of water.
Up in the window, the sky was a powdery yellow. A dark-eyed junco fluttered into view and settled onto the frame. His little head swiveled once or twice. He saw me. Then he leapt for the sky.
Embracing Forever 
You sure do have an active imagination Michael.
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Thank you, Brad. Perhaps I was fed something psychedelic at a key stage of development. I’ve heard some interesting stories about drinking the Kool Aid… 🙂
Michael
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LOL
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Did you ever see the movie Amelie? There is a scene in which she sees the love of her life only he doesn’t know how she feels about him. She just looks at him and turns into liquid spilling all over the floor. This line: “Memories of a thousand deaths were instantly freed” did that to me. Instantly unglued.
Alison
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Hi Alison,
We did see it once, a long time ago, but I think we were interrupted by something about a third of the way through and it was just one of those things to which we never quite returned. I remember thinking periodically, we should finish that…
Thank you for your note, for recognizing the coming unglued– for walking this road beside me.
Much Love
Michael
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Wonderful imagery Michael; you have a talent for making renunciation sexy!
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Shhhh….
Don’t tell anyone, Hariod. Please.
It’s really not as fun as it seems on television… 🙂
Michael
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I like how these posts capture the emotional side of the awakening process. It is so easy to miss this if one reads only non-duality / advaita literature. There, they always say, “Oh, it all happens in awareness. You are awareness. Just ask yourself to whom this thought does occur.” No big deal, right ? Awakening should be very easy then.
Sometimes they even do mention words like fear, vulnerability, humility. But it sounds so clinical.
I like how you describe these emotional aspects of the journey. The desperate yearning. The fear of surrender. The vulnerability. You really do this ‘Show , don’t tell’ which is always taught to students of writing classes.
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Hi Karin,
I really appreciate your comment here. Thank you for reading and seeing with such vision. The intellectual understanding and the philosophies are one thing, and even the deep attraction one feels in the core of their being– that resonance with truth– but to truly move into that deeper, living space and sustain it requires encountering certain realities within ourselves we can’t always control. Emotions, as you say. Conflicts, between beliefs and experience, between ideas and feelings… Until we develop the perspective or the wisdom to work with them, they can be quite overwhelming.
But through them I think we are taken to such glorious views. It isn’t about staying in these conflicts, but the first time we see them, the first time we see just how deeply they have been entrenched in our lives and our thoughts and our responses, it is scary. Like you have written recently yourself, there is a disservice done when the felt experience of the path is simply dismissed, or the one walking it is not prepared in any way for what will emerge.
(And thank you for the note about my writing… Much gratitude…)
Michael
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When you got to “One car door seemed a secret greater than I could carry” I stopped for a good while. There are these moments, aren’t there, where the still point of the universe is seen clearly for being that car door, that leaf on the end of a branch, the sound of a ball bouncing in the distance, where Is more than we can even take in in that one still point and yet we have an infinity of those enormous pinpoints all in each single moment. Whew! Thank you for putting all of this down, while I can only focus on one. line. at. a. time.
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Yes, M, there are so many of those moments. It’s like each moment is a tesseract of quantum-possibility-perception-unfoldings. For me, that is the way healing and deeper understanding arrive– through flickers of movement through the heart space, through thoughts practicing the art of the cliff dive just below my thinking mind. There’s just a dollop of sound, but it’s enough to cause us to look up from what we’re doing. That is the zoom zoom you so perfectly describe: the sudden zoom out into everything. Who goes there!? I think as we become practiced in the art of zooming, we re-develop the ability to keep the biggest pictures in mind while we’re painting our grains of rice… 🙂
Enjoy your weekend!
Michael
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Well now. This is interesting. I have a bit of writing that has remained private, yet I did have one post, Wolf Woman, in which I alluded to this larger piece of work. It is highly similar to what you post here. Highly similar. Perhaps there are interesting, frightening, gentle, violent, thirst quenching places we all visit. A certain energetic location, translated into experience by our sensory organs and brains. My translation was different, but so similar that I have goosebumps. And it ain’t cold here my friend. Well, this is just beautiful and fun to read and, as other commenters have noted, one.line.at.a.time. reading with an accent of sexy. I can only imagine what Part 4 will hold….
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Interesting, indeed! I remember that post, Andrea. It was awesome fierce. I agree there are these immense realities we do our best to translate into understood experience. For me, the words can only come later. I think when we let ourselves go into the heart of that place, without holding too much back. Just giving ourselves to it, that we are filled with grace, and are contacting the enormous “life” we all share. I can only catch up to what happened in those moments far down the road. The downloads that come. The healing that flows through. The realization of what happened comes, often I think, in the moments like Marga described here. When the weather changes…
Speaking of which. Snow today. And despite the naysayers, it is quite beautiful. There is something about crystalline whispers dropping from the sky I can never get too annoyed about… 🙂
Michael
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wonderful cleansing with spiritually dear teachers
these personal, creative fictional realizations, Michael!
gracefully offers visions
mesmerizing to
my heart’s eye 🙂
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Hi David,
Thank you… I am working away in a holy field described by one of the lines from your poem today, clearing all that unexploded ordinance from the past. I loved that line. I think it’s locked in, my friend.
Much Love
Michael
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thank you for the heads up, Michael!
i’ll ease into the post so
not to be blown to pieces
by ordnance
all at once 🙂
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Bring a mine sweeper. 🙂
Actually, I think you’ll sail right through. The pure of heart have a way of navigating these things with ease…
Peace
Michael
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I had to wait, Michael, until I had time to really read your post…to be able to decipher it. Alone. No interruptions.
You are amazing and I think this work is magical. I connect to it…I feel that I KNOW you. It is powerful, yet gentle. It is dark, yet light. It is life, yet fantasy. It is fabulous 🙂
Thank you for taking me on this journey…I am going to read the next one right now…even though I want to save it because I don’t want it to be over!! ❤
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Hi Lorrie,
Wow… Thank you for such a lovely and heart-warming response. I’m deeply touched. You do know me. And I you.
I see you are cooking up some beautiful heart-renderings over your way, and I look forward to catching up imminently.
Blessings
Michael
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Yes…we do know each other…don’t we! Thanks Michael…have a super day ❤
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Love this, Michael. Besides being beautiful writing the imagery is so graphically realistic in the very best of ways. All of your writing takes me to a place, I know not where. It feels safe to freefall into your world and expand the mind. It provides a world in which to let go of “reality”.
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Thank you, Ellen. What a great compliment, that you feel safe to freefall into the images I have on offer. I hope they are, above all else, helpful.
Michael
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