a beginning in the middle
Spacious was the ancient and ruined sanctuary I entered on that night. Or at least it claimed to be a sanctuary. That's not how I experienced it, but the nomenclature has it that it's a sanctuary, so that's what I call it. Not that I'm one for upholding nomenclature.
The cold flagstones seemed to rise up and greet my bare feet as I passed under the soaring stone arches high overhead. The roof had long ago fallen in, leaving the interior open to the steadily appearing darkness of the night sky. I would have turned and fled, for the invitation of this place was accompanied by a deep foreboding. Yet it remained an invitation and something propelled me, or pulled me onward. I couldn't quite tell which.
The enormous round opening that once held a surely splendid rose window framed the night's rising waning moon. Far beneath the rose window, surrounded by a host of steadily burning candles, knelt a cloaked figure on top of the altar.
I stopped and gazed apprehensively at this scene. The altar was not meant for people. The figure was so still for so long that I began to think it was a fixture, a statue. But statues did not belong on altars either. They were not made for sacrificing. It was the slow upraising of arms that brought me back to reality. The figure rose to stand, arms still outstretched toward the heavens.
And then it began to rain upward, the water coming from the floor as if it were the sky.
... ... …
Without a thought, I found myself running toward the altar and the figure standing atop it, arms now met together above its head pointing upward, the direction in which the rain was rising. I didn't know why I was running or what I was going to do when I reached the altar.
As I came near, the figure fluidly and gracefully lowered its arms to draw back its hood, and simultaneously lithely turned to face me. I froze in my tracks.
Her gaze somehow fixed me to the spot. Silver curls of hair cascaded down her shoulders, onto her full breasts, and spilled over and off them like softly glowing rays of an illuminated waterfall. I wasn't sure if it was the shift in my position or a trick of the changing light, but her cloak now seemed a translucent flowing garment, allowing for the emanation of a deep light from within, as if she herself were the source of this light.
Her beauty was terrible to behold. So beautiful, she was beyond desire. Quite beyond the bounds of desire. I did not know this feeling. It was altogether foreign to me. What precisely was I to feel in this moment? Lust? Fear? Repulsion? Bliss? Bright? Asleep? Dead? Alive? Everything? Nothing?
Frozen. Utterly frozen.
"You're wondering." Her voice contained the most beauteous music, a symphony of harmony, elemental in its essence.
"Yes," I thought, "I'm wondering many things."
"No," her spoken music washed over me and through me, "you're wondering two things which is one thing. You're wondering who I am and you're wondering who you are, which is to say you're wondering who we are."
Who are we when we cease forgetting?
The question erupted from the deep subterranean corridors where my unknown self resides. Her question, my question, was truer than any answer I'd ever found.
"Follow me if you dare, for you must." A mythically deep clanging sounded from her words, from everywhere, as if an abyssal cathedral of steel had been struck by the hand of god.
She then descended from the altar as if she were aided by an invisible hand. She began walking toward me. The rain still down-poured, or up-poured to the above.
Her gaze told me wholly who she was and I knew here there was no lie. I was going to be taken. To where, I did not know.
Only feet from me now I could feel the presence of something I had never before known and never before imagined. A force inexplicably massive in power such that it felt to blanket existence itself. All that was ever known and all that ever was knowing, at the mercy of this extinguishing omnipotence. Nothing, not even God, would make it out.
Only inches she was from me now. Her eyes opened into a new world, doors into a place beyond familiarity. Her irises were rays of a sacred world, barred to no one. I would leave this ground to walk into that land if I did not have to bring this body with me, if I did not have to remain here.
An inch from me and I recalled my future life, the one I could not live for I had to live this one; the one I could not live for I feared it and I feared it because I feared leaving this one.
I noticed bits of matter swirl gently around and between us like ash on an unfelt gentle breath of wind. Outward from us they floated. Away from us. Away from me. Away from my body. Leaving my body as my body. I was disintegrating, being slowly exploded apart.
She disappeared into me, and I disappeared.
... ... ...
The rain fell down upon me, splashing into my outstretched rain-filled cupped hands. I could not tell if my eyes were closed or open. My feet were set on the solid stone altar beneath me.
Falling to my knees, my gaze was turned back onto myself. A child stood where I had fallen. In its effervescence it looked into my gaze's invisible presence, seeing me like I'd been seen for the first time. There was nowhere I could hide to evade its gaze because I did not want to hide.
This child knew nothing and yet everything. Because it did not know, it knew me; knew me as I wanted to be; knew me as the one I had killed long ago at the behest of a world frightened at that self's becoming; knew me as I'd never known myself.
Returning into myself I felt the unforgiving welcome of the cold altar stone as my bed beneath me. The water of the earth was extinguishing my candle. Let it go out, I thought, for this flame is not made for this rain, but this rain was made for this flame.
a flicker, a briefly glowing ember,
darkness
endless time
... ... ...
I gaze back at I, a miracle beholding a miracle. The central mythic pillar which holds up the great cathedral of time itself stands through me. The doors of the unknown open to the sacred halls of knowing and here, I find my greatest treasure.
It was said,
You are here by the hand of the unknown, by what can not be remembered.
You have nothing to give but everything.
I cannot tell you who you are not, for I am you as you are and have always been.
And so I ask you,
who are we when we cease remembering?