ORGANIZING LIGHT

Book III: So This is Prison

I lie awake here, reaching for her. She’s long gone, even the last strands of hair left behind have disappeared into the Milky Way. I recall very little, you see, the last many years blended together like the ancient tobacconist’s cigars he’d seal with brandy before handing them off to the clientele to set aflame into the void, his hands stained by the sticky leaves. He made me one from a leaf shaped like a star and my fingertips burned as the foot shrank into the air I wasn’t ready to let go.

I can only breathe so much these days and now I’m surrounded, hands of every ghost I ever knew dragging me to the floor. I see Cecilia again - her hair becomes silver before my eyes. Every conversation the last yet here we are - the leaves changing shape before me. It’ll be autumn soon, the colors will bend and not one habit will have changed.

I thinks it’s a meat grinder, where we are right now because this is all that’s left of me. We pass through it again and again as the cosmos are just the imprint of repeat, this the punishment for missing enlightenment when it’s right there screaming at us through the ripples of a hand-dug pond, the dance of a bonfire’s flame in the wind at night - it’s everywhere and I don’t see a thing. That I can’t even see where I am in this suffocating fog and neither can you, even with the damn siren behind us pointing me along the path to finally waking outside of all this. She’s grown old waiting too. I’ll smile a toothless grin God knows how many times, knowing I’m stuck here because I just can’t seem to get it right before the end - every star in the night sky the sketch of a failure and I’m born again.

I’ve been here before. Over and over I know. A familiar door I know to open. The old fridge outside full of carved deer carcass - this is the Midwest after all. The sound of the night’s watch - frogs and owls and trees and whatnot by the ponds fed by an ancient creek. This has all been. Cigarette lighter above the icebox, never used but for igniting the loose fabric of the universe. Our calling the icebox “the icebox.” Why are we here and why does this all feel like a repeat?

I wonder about that sometimes. Is the cosmos just us again and again? My eyes close and my fingertips reach for everything that ever was each night when we drift, becoming a wrench in time. I don’t know what’s left for us at the picnic of dead Gods but it probably ain’t much, I told the girl sitting with me at the coffee shop - her hair strands of gold spun into humanity. I’m almost certain she isn’t really human but what does that matter I suppose? She didn’t have much to say after that so we drank in peace. I’ll get us another, if you want, she said; the doves above her hips clear as day. I’ve been here before and she’s either a siren sent to distract me away or a savior set to release me - I remember it all so clearly and either way this secret, crux of the universe - is no more.

It changes everything.