An inspired story...
I thought that I was dead. Done for. Reduced to an indeterminable amount of insignificance. Everything around me was cold. Frozen. Utterly lifeless. It was as lonely as it was painful and it was forever. In my mind, it was forever.
My memory of you had become a spiralling thorn. Coring deeper into my flesh with every turn of thought. I remember cursing the beloved and cherished fabric of our love. It felt as a stain upon my heart. An irremovable stain. O, the torment.
An involuntary turn inwards led me in the direction of my own soul. It was brighter than I knew how to acknowledge. I mistook it for the threat of sundering and turned away only to find it closer to me. I turned and turned and as clearly as that thorn bore deeper, I became closer to my soul. The light of its radiance was a mirror and in that reflection I could only see your beautiful face. I saw your fingertips grazing the blades of grass that were my hair. I saw your tenderly calloused feet wriggle beneath the canopy of your springtime dress, dancing about in the wind of my breath. I saw the wrinkles of your face curl from the direction of your own heart which leapt towards me with open arms and golden warmth. In the light of my inescapable soul, I saw you. I saw you so perfectly and yet, I could not reach you. I could not touch you. I could not find your ear with my voice and I could not hold you close to me. What pain it was to behold my beloved in this way. My longing for you grew great and gnarly fangs that sunk into my flesh. My desire for you gave birth to a vicious beast with a ceaseless hunger and a voracious rage. My tender heart grew as cold as the frozen desert and formed a shell that was as hard as my love for you was soft.
The greatest pain of all came from the thought of your loneliness; from the bitter vision of your extended hand finding only the ashes of my extinguished fire where you sought my comforting embrace. I couldn't bare it. I would burn down the sky before I would accept a universe where we could not be. I had never once before, considered my own capacity in this way but I knew then, that I could disintegrate existence with a single thought and I was on the brink with an eye fixed to the heavens. It all came down to this one moment. This decision. To trust this pain to deliver me back to you, or to trust that my destruction would clear the debris between us.
As the crippling fear of losing you or destroying you reached its threshold, I begged some higher force to end it. I could not choose to accept a life without you and I could not choose to tear down the world that was made from you. For all of my pain, I surrendered. I squeezed every last ounce of spirit out through my lungs. I contracted every muscle and compressed every feeling into a single sound that sheared my body as it erupted forth into the chasm of space that enveloped me in hopelessness. The cry echoed from every invisible wall in the universe as I collapsed down beside the river of time. The last thing that I heard before fading into the abyss, was the sound of water flowing over stones.
I realized that the blackness of night is not the same thing as the absence of love. That daylight is not the exclusive provider of grace and beauty. That even without light cascading over your skin, revealing the shape of your sheathe, you are still there, with me, like you've always been. As I swam through the void of the light of my soul, crumpled upon the earthen floor without any semblance of a body with which to swim, I felt your presence everywhere. There wasn't a single particle in space where you were not. In fact, your presence was so prevalent in that space that I was consumed by it, and along with it came the spark of my realization...
"I thought that our time together was so short. I thought that you had been taken from me and I was to go on living without a beating heart to sustain me. I thought that fate was so cruel; malicious. I lost sight of the green in the skies and the earth in your eyes. I couldn't go on. And now...when I expected to find endless torment and punishment, I find you everywhere. I am nestled within your song, my love. I am cradled within your heart. In this darkness, it is as though I exist within my truest knowing of you. I have found you in the single place that I expected to be buried and hidden away from you. I realize now that I was never more with you than I am now. This darkness is no absence. This darkness is complete union..."
I awoke not to sound of the water flowing over stones. I awoke to the sweet sound of your song floating on waves of air that travelled directly through me. I could feel it before I could hear it and it felt like the rapture of my heart. It was this rapture and this rapture alone that lifted me again upon my own legs with enough steadiness to stumble forward. Along the river, I followed the vibration of your song. Trepidation passed by me as clouds and thunder and paid me no mind. Weariness became fatigued of me and it too, left my company. Doubt and pain troubled me less and less with each footprint left behind and for every footprint there was a rising within my spine that ignited the fire of my heart once again. Your song was like a mother eagle having swooped beneath my falling body, to lift me and carry me home. I followed only your song. Nothing else. And I was made so strong in its cadence.
I walked without interruption for lifetimes. Images passed through my mind like memories of forgotten times, some of which threatened and belittled me but your song was the blade that cut right through without hesitation and entirely with purpose. Eventually, I arrived upon the precipice of a great divide; the last hurdle. The space in between us. This time, I knew. I knew that this "space" didn't actually represent separation. As I looked across and my eyes landed upon you, again, I spoke,
"Like a gravity, we are pulled towards each other. Like electricity, we push past any resistances to find each other. There is nothing else in this entire universe that matters.
Our stories are weapons that we lay down at each others’ feet before we embrace the humbleness of the ocean that was crossed, just to be here, before each other. To make a choice in this moment, to behold each other.
In our beholding, the song of Life rises from the Dead Sea like gentle rain being swept up and into the sky by the power of Love. In beholding each other, Love is given Life and Life is given Love and both Life and Love become one, together. Shiva and Shakti. You and I.
We are inevitable, my Love.
Being together is the Destiny of Life."
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