This weekend the sky was an absolute abyss. One glimpse at trees grounded would force my eyes and mental state into focus, but if I allowed them to blur and intentionally faded their lit leaves and roots too deep I could rise and fall into the chasm that was the sky. My eyes were drawn in and towards, so far-flung open they ached, but with an unveiling that is beautiful and only stabbingly surprising because it had for so long remained unseen. The sky was a deep ocean radially softening to a light, white blue. The clouds smoke-signal puffed from a cornered source and rippled as if reflections on water, the entire sky the bottomless surface of a freshwater lake. There was convergence and divergence as reliant on air temperature and wind as on my own fractal manipulation, the crystallised mass kaleidoscoping to my will and imagination. After days the clouds dissolved, seemingly while I stared too hard to notice, and there was left only the seamless gradient of a darkening dusk, purpled.
Nothing was different.
Two days ago the water was soft if at all on my legs and rippled rainbows from surface wind and sunbeams. A petal shaped childlike rainbow tiled across the lucid blue, rising and twisting and falling in a chromatic vibration. Thousands and thousands until dispersion and light and a beauty undulating was all there was. Where the jet pumped out more water the movement made on the surface was fiction of the scientific sort. As if the water was being tugged, pulled tight like scarred skin. But it was translucent, with daggers of afternoon light. The water I had cupped in my hand and proceeded to drop from my fingers had a solidity, an invisible cloak-like quality; its matter ethereal, its temperament ambient.
Yesterday my body was unashamed. It housed my bits, my pieces — my unravelling insides — and it was assured of its practical form. Disposed of clothes, instead of a melding or a fusing there was simply air and flesh with no discernible difference, in quite the same way as the dark lavender above ends as a light mauve on the skyline. A statement my body did not make, it was not asserting its nakedness, it would have been as comfortable overlooking a balcony onto a crowded street. Shoulder blades celestial, stomach pale, a welcoming womanly moon bathed in dark blue, feet ancient and Roman, nipples pursed to welcome the paralleling stars; pleasure expansive, and unequivocal. My face was inconsequential.
Last night the stars were pinpricks in the black felt cloth of night, their fluttering rip revealing a light behind so blinding that if the curtain indeed came down the earth would be washed in an illuminated explosion. Today you are as important as I, a silent, radiant solace that I am indeed not one but an extension of another of the same understanding. Your hand in my hand is my hand in my hand as my hand is yours in yours. Today you matter as I matter. Your shadow more comforting to me than the fleshy body of any other, your presence my sunlit Secret Garden. Today you are my undying escort to Aristophanes’ dance.
