Sensing

She reached a hand into the air before her, eager to touch something, anything—a candlestick, the edge of a desk—hers... I slip through the world, she thought: Whereas the bodies they have move through space more easily than mine, seem alive, and I—I move on and drift. She looked out of her window into the dark glass of a shop across the way. How strange, witnessing the bright lights of town, which changed into the muted golden squares of windows in the suburban homes that followed, while the body floated, rushed, was driven on through mazes, through the voids of streets thick and thin...

Transported, in a flash, here and here and here, as ‘there’ faded into a memory and rustled softly against other memories, like so many layers of tissue paper... and settled at last in a dreamy smile of recollection, a nervous twitch of the ankle at dinnertime. The refuse and the litter, the debris of the day exhausted shoulders had carried, slipped away—onto the next destination... humans, though not destined for flight by birthright as the earthbound species, see us now in the sky in so many forms. How natural—how strange. She wondered sometimes at the toys humans had invented to mimic—by turns, a galloping stallion, a migratory bird, a deep diving whale, a thundering ox... The body was in this day, thrilled, electrified, brought here, pulled there... One wonders how humans go on being themselves. She had long tempered the question by simply accepting, rather passively, that she was born a strange thing in strange skin and setting, and the chief task in life was to figure out how to make the best of it, sensing, sensing, like a red fox with nose to the ground, tracking scent in a forest... One was, existentially speaking, placed in a life bewildered, and one learned by acquiescing to the passing of day. But let us not dwell too much, for one having peeked into the existential maze, dare she step in, ever so cautiously, was at threat of being lost for ever in its twists and riddles... It is not the why of living (why am I living in this body, one asks repeatedly with no clear answer) but how must I bear it, and one must, one must, one must not be lulled under by the bobbing of the waves, entranced by the calling, sleeping, deep beyond...

The body is a terrain upon which every sort of weather passes and landscape persists—mountain ranges and sunny skies and abysses of human secrets, that reservoir of the past we all hoard—but a calm beats beneath the eventual surface. She is composed of rocks older than time, and fragments that kissed the Earth upon its formation. Body is what one makes of it—it withers, or is tall and triumphant, like a proud plant arching towards the sun—the sun... she blinked and the cool salt air blew upon her cheeks.

Ecstatic joy, reverie—a sweet mercy and a bitter pity—that these do not last forever. Flares of anger, the body is on fire—and cold disdain—we turn to ice. The body is the center of motional earthquakes of varying intensities, complete with aftershocks. Who does not know the fury with which we ruminate after a trusted one has hurt us? Shock after shock, wave after wave, of sensations of the anger as if the incident were fresh happening, with powers of imagination to assist.

One, it was found, lived actually apart from every other thing. One was atoms vibrating in space, and the eternal loneliness of it all threatened to crush her. There was the loneliness and the coming together... She wondered that her molecules should forever be apart from the sloshing water at her feet.

The seawater rose and expanded—she was no longer limited to the boundary of human self, but entire with the ocean, the gray and white seabirds swooping gracefully overhead. She was one of them, flying in front of the orange sun... one gave a shrill cry and she rose to meet the sound—and then she was nothing at all... She was from the water and of it. As a newborn calf struggles for first breath and then, miraculously, almost immediately walks, she too gulped the fresh sea air, hobby and unsteady. This feeling of relief combined with the opposing force of excitation pouring through her veins and capillaries, glittering through the inner body... A small, stubborn flame was lighted within. The body, released from confinement to sofa and chair, relishes the sea and sand, the churning, menacing, rushing waves, warmth alternating with cool wind on skin. She relished in being, and that was all.

A snake strikes when one least expects it. So she had lived in fear of the great serpentine unknown, the crawling, slithering darkness of humanity, but here was the antidote, an answered prayer; that good, perhaps, on occasion won over evil. Such a thing as light brightened against a background of darkness, and she wielded light—she cast her eyes down into that great body of tears...

She was a tacit agreement between spirit and matter—the end product, the living being, the point of light.