Spheres

|
My family had driven many miles to visit the place where we had grown up together - in the early, pre-dawn years that memory makes glossy, like dolls behind smeared glass. This place does not exist in body, in the world, but its mental frontiers are vast.

My brother led us down a dirt path lined with houses, little chain-link fences and pleasantly decrepit yards on either side. We were drowning in late-afternoon sunlight, only supercharged; everything was painted in glowing yellow. Bits of pollen suspended luminously in the air.

He mounted the porch of a home I vaguely recognized. Some old matron of my youth (who does not exist in body, but in mind) whom I didn't remember. Sadness filled me, lacking the energy to be adored, to participate in the mourning of time with someone I should love but whose page in the narrative had moldered into illegibility.

I kept walking down the path, alone. Everything moved like it was drowning in ethereal molasses. Looking up, three rainbows arced towards one another, making colorful traceries in the clouds. Nobody else saw.

Perfectly framed, I continued towards my nowhere destination, plodding impossibly slowly, wrapped in amber. Music welled - first a low chant, emanating from everything around me. Then drums, angelic voices, a toneless rumble that was the vast knocking-together of celestial rubble. It was all music, all sound, restored to its unified totality. This song had always been playing, would always play, was the divine symphony of life, keeping rhythm to every movement, every thought, every mote of conscious and unconscious beingness in its passage through the universe. I lifted up into the air, hair flowing out behind me as if underwater, cradled by God. The moment lasted forever while I cried.