Tearing through the wreckage of the basilica in a futile quest for salvation, I found the pulpit was empty. I have broken her body and raided her mind; I have banished the joy from her heart, and crushed her as if she has not feelings. Taking all that was not rightfully mine, spitting trails of sanctimony which drool to the ground through mouthfuls of cracked teeth and congealing blood. A thousand heretics howl in self-immolation against a skyline of searing fire. A stay of execution. Mutually assured destruction.
I am trapped in the prism of a mirrored glass elevator, ascending towards the heavens, breaking every façade: anything to feel this alive. And I am looking for an exit, an escape hatch, a window to the sky: a solitary square of light to which only I can climb. I am reaching higher but touching only ceiling. It is descending now. The summit is retreating at a rate of knots, and so too are the walls. This box is like a cinema, cold blue flames dancing wispily on the surface as a serpent’s tongue licks at my heels.
The illusion gains traction. My hand reaches out to hers in the blackness of space, and for a solitary instant we are touching through the glass. The impression of motion, frozen forever in the briefest moment of clarity.
The glaring warning lights of the mothership betray an intellect beyond human capability. Rationality gives way to an aesthetic of slaughter, revealing finally the thin line between science and war. A violation of the most basic law of physical matter. The machines of conflict. The dead and the dying. Suddenly I can no longer see into the void, only fleeting glimpses of an expectation cruelly sabotaged by misguided volition. All our lives, devoured in the maw of a gleaming fear trap.
Impact.
The compression mechanism fractures. It activates in the presence of violence. The pressure cracks and the shield obliterates. I am fighting against impossible torrents as the air around me is briskly ripped into oblivion. The remnants of a sentient being, blasted out of the airlock.
The compartment is depressurising. The lifesource is being sucked away. Gravity is suspended. I am rocketing through the atmosphere propelled by forces beyond imagination, on the way to becoming pure energy. A vertical trajectory through quantum maths and matrices, floating in a warm bath of moral equivalencies which could never hope to reconcile. Diluted sunspots flare to pinpoint the windows on this open highway as Catherine wheels shower sparks into the night. I am becoming part of the empty space which exists between dead weight and temporality. Harmonic discord and electromagnets. The agents of chaos. The failure of emotion. The origins of consciousness, radiated from on high in a surge of luminous intensity.
I can’t see the future now, only jagged visions of hopeless, wasted potential: a lifetime of servitude which none dare call progress. Vacuum-sealed and lacking breather holes, I am trapped inside a taut cellophane bubble, clawing at the membrane. The surface is impermeable. The water level’s rising. The oxygen is depleting. Suffocating in utero: a regimented programme of anaesthesia which lasts long into the night. As the fusion binds with the reactor, they’re already reporting a malfunction. I wait with one finger on the button, pleading frantically to avert further crisis, screaming when will all this STOP
* * *
Neptune stirs. A nebulous warmth, expanding and contracting in gentle sighs of possibility. At its core, a tranquillity that could last for centuries. Through a lens of innocent wonder, I see it all. The dawning of a new Ice Age. The evolution of man. The founding of America. Images flicker in stop-motion replay as the figures swirl back and forth beneath the sphere’s watery surface, a whirlwind of possibilities refracted endlessly through the dense mist of her sea. Oceans turning. Seasons changing. Tides breaking. Perpetual, surviving fragments of a love beyond comprehension. She is intercepting my signal and responding; a raw, unfiltered wavelength travelling through space and time. The past and the future. The shattering of the present. As I recall the way her eyes shone, the lingering ache of her gaze sparkles like glitter from an igniting star; I see her atomised in a thousand particles, vibrating concurrently at the speed of light.
Inside its chamber, my heart is pulsating. Restless and yearning, bound to my one true love. She is travelling on a beam of illumination set for the heart of the sun, drifting eternally in a world parallel to mine. The stillness at the centre of the universe. The axes of gravity. The blaze of the firmament. She and I are becoming whole and permanent for the first time in living memory. We blink our eyes and wait for the question.
C.C. 10/09/11
