The Flayed Man

The light grew heavier, thickening until it pressed against my skin like warm flesh. I could feel it entering me, not through the eyes alone but through every pore, every filament of nerve, until there was no longer a boundary between what was seen and the one who sees. I was no longer standing in the world — I was of it, poured out like honey into the great cup of morning.

The sky did not arch above me like a roof — it opened like a wound of pure azure, and from it poured not terror but infinite welcome. Each cloud drifted like a thought the earth was dreaming, slow and luminous, and I, too, was a thought — not my own, but the world’s.

I could feel my edges dissolving, the limits of my body falling away like old scabs. I was spilling outward, diffusing into leaf and wind and stone, until I was the wind moving through the leaves, I was the stone warmed by the climbing sun. And it was not death. Oh, no — it was the most vivid life, more real than any narrow self I had clung to.

The pulse in my throat became the pulse of the earth. The blood in my veins was not mine alone, but mingled with the sap rising in roots, with the rivers curling through the soil. Every beat, every movement, was a cosmic affirmation — yes, said the earth, yes, said the sky, and I said yes back, without words, without even thought, only a surging up from the core of me, from that molten center where I and everything else were one.

And joy — that thin, trembling thing I once knew — had swollen into a vast and golden tide that threatened to drown me in its splendor. But I was not afraid. I opened myself like a flower to it, reckless and raw, letting it fill me until there was nothing left but light and song.

Even pain, even death, even the long corridors of loss and despair I had once walked — they had no power here. They were swallowed in the great music that thrummed behind all things, a music so sweet and fierce it made my bones ache with love for everything: the broken, the ugly, the forgotten. All of it gleamed now, all of it shone, as though the sun itself had stooped to kiss every atom of dust.

Time collapsed entirely. There was no before and after, no past gnashing its teeth, no future looming with open jaws. Only this — this endless now, rich and thick and golden, stretching outward without end. I floated in it, weightless, nameless, but more myself than I had ever been.

And in the silence that followed, I felt it — the secret heartbeat of the universe, soft and sure, as steady as the turning of the stars. And I knew then, with a knowing deeper than reason, that I had never been alone, not once.

The grass knew me. The stones remembered. The light had been waiting all along, patient as love.

And as I breathed — if breath it was — I became the world’s own laughter, golden and wild and free, echoing forever in the endless halls of being.