Irregularity

My heart beats with irregularity sometimes.  I can feel it.  I can feel it pressed up against my rib-cage and sternum, between my lungs; breathe in, breathe out. Ok.  Again now.  My heart beats irregularly.  When I speak to you.  When I see you, and I am not sure why.  But I would guess it has something to do with the raven on your shoulder standing proud and strong.  This is dangerous.  I imagine it has something to do with the polluted ocean gazing back at me when I look into your eyes.  I imagine there are better ways to describe this but I am doing the best I can considering the circumstances.  See, memory is a fickle thing, and she does not lend herself to a proper translation.  Cruel as it may be I am trying my best here.  Can you forgive me?

Because I am not sure if I should call this a retrospective.  I remember experiencing some sort of flashover or flashbulb and it was like a white hot coal burning through synapses; exploding in the brightest colors and fading as the morning fog crawls across the open plains.  And still your polluted ocean moves with the moon, catching my attention and pulling me in directions that no real compass could identify.  Like I said before.  I am trying to decide if I should call this a retrospective.

What I really mean to say is that you were priming me.

For what it’s worth.  I was asking for it.  I had found myself in this unknown space.  I oriented myself quickly, identifying the major landmarks, the major players, and of course in which direction the oceans lie, in the case of my escape they would be needed.  But I have never been one to focus purely on the physical and that is where you lost me.  Somewhere beyond the topography and the oceans you built a fortress and God how the walls beat me down and disoriented me.

Or maybe this is all topographical and I want to explode: ruin the map.

As far as I am concerned, and believe me I might be concerned. This landscape is boring and dry.  Cycles of rain and wind have had their way and moved on to the oceans.  There is safety in emptiness though.  That is why the oceans attract such storms.  They are like the older kids you always knew.  They carried dangerous words and unfortunate objects.  But we knew them anyway.  We counted dangerous words among our friends.  We were armed to the teeth.  We felt immeasurably large and life simple; it was beautiful.

Flashbulb.  Click.  I slipped into retrospective.  But God the pictures look good.

I don’t remember how these pictures felt but I have rehearsed their meanings for three or more years and I can’t quite shake the feeling that what I know now to be the truth of that moment is skewed by wet faces, blood shot eyes, and water logged clothes.  Dew drops are supposed to be beautiful.  Not when they are frozen to your eyelids.  Not to think that it got cold while you cried over which way to turn but you did and it is a scary thought because now both paths have proven themselves desolate.  They weren't always this way.  I’m sure they were once alive.  It is really just a question of sensory details.

Speaking of sensory details.  A note on my thoughts:

           

Tonight I will continue my journey, wandering from tree to tree with no specific rhyme or reason and no real intentions.  See this forest was once proud.  Trees stood tall and danced with each other in the wind and the snow.  They slept under full moons while animals explored territory foreign to human footsteps.  Rivers and streams once trembled and shrank, grew and jumped, fretfully, frantically down mountainsides.  Sometimes they would disappear whispering devilishly beneath the forest floor, leading to unknown worlds.  This place was vibrant and skies were the deepest blue.  If any place were to burn bright, this place would burn beautifully and it would be impossible to ignore the revolution and the possibility of renewal.  This was a place of explosive possibility.  It has become a landscape littered with volatile ash and mud capable of a transfiguration that degrades and carries away.

You can feel it in each delicate step.  This land is like silk and glass.  With each fragile step a new crack begins.  Spider webs weave their disconnected lines across the landscape.  They will cut you open if you are not careful, and no matter how much you hope it will, the blood left on those devilish traps will not save anyone.

In the early days the swings were always empty.  They would sway in the wind as if the children had flown too high and simply vanished into the sun.  Icarus become far too real.  Yet, in recent nights simple laughter is beginning to ring through the trees; it weaves its way through blackened trunks and fragile soil, assaulting my ears. It was almost like church bells, the laughter, it rolled and tumbled over itself like a landslide with no explosion of sound.  Yet, the possibility was there.  A ticklish excitement rode on the wind and I would count. One.  Two.  Three. Four…Ten.  Here I come.  Fast feet and even faster hopes.  Finding ghosts is no way to go about this search. I press madly onward weaving through broken limbs and frayed ropes.  All in a desperate search for a tangible sign of life.

And when you really start to think about it.  Silk and glass don’t mix.  You would never expect to find them together anywhere but here.  It is optically transparent.  What they mean by that is it is see through.  The glass that is.  It is brittle and fragile, composed of materials that have been worn down by the very hands of a God.  Slowly.  Slowly.  It takes thousands of years, combined with heat and pressure that cannot be imagined.

But there is another way.  A shortcut born of the ferocity of storms and given to few.  It is glass born of pain and searing complication.  It is born of fire and water and it will grow old shortly.  Lightning.  Instant ignition.  Fire.  Furnace heat. Explosive.  It is instantaneous and quiet, and very much alive.

What I am really trying to say here is that in a land of silk stretched thin over glass you can’t expect to catch up with ghosts.  What I am saying is the details are important, but I’ll never remember them all.

This is just a search for tangible signs of life.  And that is all we have ever done.  We began stumbling through forests and undergrowth overgrown and left to wither in a succession of possibility wrapped up and packed in a vast world of silence.  A void filled with promise.  Promise filled with obligation and intention.

Then.

Fire.

And we always end right here, among the wasteland rubble trees.  The children’s laughter, just a trick of the senses.  I always find him.

He lay like a wet blanket, twisted and contorted, then frozen to the ground in some grotesque manner reminiscent of all the pictures you tried to ignore.  He is alive.  I assure you he is because I have spoken with him.

Hauntingly beautiful words.

Touch the wine to my lips.

He is dying.  I don’t have this authority.

Allow me the bread.

I swear that’s not how a soul should breathe.  I tuck it between his lips.

The body and blood of Christ

Then it is finished.