November 1st, 1998

It was a night of incredible peace and loveliness.

It was a night of incredible healing, and a path towards what we most desire. Imagine an apartment with wooden floors, varnished and tarnished with age and care. Imagine windows with painted white ledges. Imagine candles sitting atop every available surface, and soft music playing. Imagine pots of tea and dishes of delectable treats.

I never really like warm apartments or parties, where the air has gone humid and jungle-heavy, where the perfume that someone wears soon becomes enmeshed in your hair, where the humidity fogs your thought and makes you as a small child, wishing to tug on the hem of some sleeve, begging to be taken home.

No, it was different. I welcomed the warmth. And it was not from a sense of cold that I wished to obliterate, either. It was simply that I did not want to miss a single moment of this evening. It's like when I click with my lover so intensely that every exhalation of breath and even every drop of sweat is something to be savored, something to engrain and emblazon upon my memory. I see into the moment much further when I can tasteseetouchsmellhear it.

I felt a sense of winding back on a path, but instead of seeing where I have recently been, I see further back, and I see where I used to like playing with fortunes and sensing auras. I see where I might have gone wrong in assuming that the world is simply what I see with my surface eyes. I see now, that when I weep, it occurs to me that I am simply opening up that part of myself, and it's nothing too emotional, nor is it just my freakishness. Perhaps there is something more, glowing bright yellow, over my right shoulder.

You reach for placid blue, I give you green, I spend my litany of mystere and discovery in white hot light that emanates from candles, from every exhalation that is rheumy with chocolate and champagne and sweet tea. I feel connections, much like I did at a high school retreat. I should post what I wrote about that, for it is true now: the connections I make are as gold wires, thin and strong, pluck them and pound them, and we shall create a piano concerto made of the devil in the tarot, and I shall hold The World, for I am the Magician. I have the Ace of Wands.

I've wondered of the people in my recent past, and how much I clutch at their memory with fingers that are worn and calloused, cuticles torn, nails ripped and bitten down. I see the clutch, and I feel it twist in my stomach, and I feel the pressure settling on my throat as if I might be looking through the doorway of some former monk's hiding place. I see it all in my head, the stories they tell. And I wonder why I still hold, why I am fearing this person appearing in my next life. It is this time of year, you see, when I ruminate most.

The leaves that fall, that slip into my shoes. This time of year is poignant, and beautiful, and cruel. There is a clarity that I do not understand. There is a cycle and a reptition, and each time I see myself in reflection and in thrall to it. Perhaps next year I will be in a different place, and I can see the other side of the leaf, the veins underneath, the pock marks of tiny mites that chew their way through green tissue, not knowing that after they chew, they will miss the orange and flame of after-life. We want so much now, that we are afraid to see the death of it.

The part of my aura that burns so brightly is the part of me that looks at the scene of the accident, and drinks it all in. I am usually the only spectator. What I have not realized is that I am my own accident, and people gape at me, mouths open, a maw of stupidity and drool and pity for my condition.

My hair is sleek and I feel rested in my body. I feel like crimson colors will come to visit me tonight in my dreams. I will not fall, and I will certainly not land with a hard thump. I love the cold in the air now, as it scurries me to bed, to cuddle, to wrap in blankets, and cocoon, emerging the next morning, bleary-eyed.

Soon I will be able to turn my head and see the brilliant wings that have unfurled while I was sleeping.