This is a story about desiring to prematurely sink your teeth into the fruits of your labour when it’s not yet your time…or something.
My eyes are dripping from something sublime miles away from my feet. I can barely get my lids to dip below the half-way point, exposing the black to the hazy rays holding their attention. I stopped blinking days ago. “There it is” I said out loud, with the kind of breath left to say three small words and nothing else. It was like everything I’d imagined. Must you describe it, tell them it’s what they’d hoped for, and it’s something real, alright. What I’m looking at is the end of the story, a glimpse behind the curtain- the sacred burning spot reserved for a faithful few. Most give up the bodies they wear for a view like this, but it’s sticking to my eyes with a syrupy glaze, shades of rose.
The space that separates me from this land of milk and honey is a frightful fall, a canyon slipping into a blackness, producing explosive deaths for the free-falling rocks. Or no deaths at all, just a stream of gravity until the end of it all. It wraps around impossibly, a fortress making the untouchable place all the more lovely (if I cannot have her). But this place is sweet enough for me to dream it. To press my naked finger against it, penetrating the smoky clouds that protect it. My two dirty eyes are undeserving, but I make a circle with my forefinger and thumb to capture it, however small, however far away. My body is a broken vehicle. All my urges to be with it, to lose my limbs and fly to it lock all of my joints violently until no movement is possible. I couldn’t move a foot forward. What fate is worse, to know of a great beauty and lose the map to find her, or to never know of such a place at all?
I spent a thousand years in this spot with only the glow of the enduring stretched out before me, fooling me enough to believe that the space between my body and it’s face would one day shorten. So I began to write words with my mind’s hands, and soon these words loosened my lips and made their sounds. Soon these sounds birthed rhythms and I began to sing. My jaw unlocked and extended below my shoulders for my siren songs of worship. I wrote notes for her, and she favored me. The songs that lept off of my tongue melted my face, oiling my mechanical arms. I began to sing with the force of a choir, seventy two voices inside my belly sprung forth into waves before me, gliding and dancing above the gaping crack in the earth, sprinkling like a spring shower on her land. This was no quick feat. It would be a thousand more years before I took my first step. Grains of sand began to move from the first pile to the second. My paradise flourished with my gratitude. I saw the faces of my brothers and sisters and they were well.
And I listened to her, yet she told me to wait. My voice deceived me for some time ahead and I asked again to come to her, but she requested patience. After some time, my voice became rotten from the air that scraped the sides of my throat, and my eyes began to drip once again. I asked for forgiveness. My songs were no longer fruitful and my body was old from my heartache of longing, as I remained where I stood. My faith often wavered, every time I chose to look away, in disbelief, my teeth would fall into the canyon, making childish whistles for songs. That’s when I began to scream in great terror. The place cruelly took shape of the city of Sodom, but her voice reached my ears enough to say, “sit still and wait”. I waited in my shackles and listened to my bones crack and lock from fear. I retreated back three steps from where I once stood. She floated further into the horizon.
I sat still and waited. I traced the faces of my brothers and studied the hairs on the heads of all my sisters. The healing properties of my obedience would swell my lungs with the kind of divine orchestra meant for her ears only, and she was once again pleased. I was joyful at the thought of touching the sands of the Great Place and in that, could daydream for hours. I think of all the things I would say to those I love most, how long I waited all alone. On the days she wraps around me smoothly, she often tells me my time will come, and I do believe her. Today, however, is not my day. Tomorrow is filled with love or longing and I shall sleep another night to find out.
