My ribs they shelter
a growing season.
My lungs they cultivate
a secret orchard.
Each breath scatters
a few more stars
through the fertile black soil
of the self.
My transformation proceeds
with exquisite courtesy.
A whisper.
A shimmer.
A slow transfer
of title deeds.
One day
the final document will arrive.
And I will sign.
The signature will flower
across the page.
Somewhere beneath it
another hand will continue
writing.
The
stars ask no questions.
They simply burn.
But I, being human, must turn even the burning into parable.
My soul is a poor spectroscope,
but still I aim it skyward.
In sleep, my mind is a planet orbiting itself.
Dream is the dark matter that keeps me from flying apart.
It cannot be seen.
But without it, nothing would cohere.
Like Aquinas’ unmoved mover, it does not glow.
But it grips.
Under the heliacal glare of Jupiter transiting Gemini, the air acquires a ferric savor, as though the atmosphere itself had bitten its tongue. The twins preside over a bifurcated courtroom erected behind the forehead. Oak benches. Tarnished brass railings. A stenographer with your handwriting. The defendant and the magistrate share a pulse.
You rise to prosecute yourself.
Your charges proliferate with liturgical fastidiousness: indolence at 09:17; a half-sincere smile; the microsecond of envy when Sheri’s silence lengthened like a corridor without doors. Each infraction is catalogued in vermilion marginalia. The pen nib rasps across the page with an insectile insistence. Outside, Halifax steams under a pewter sky. The waterfront tilts inward, becomes an alveolus within your lung.
You draft memoranda against your own fatigue. You convene subcommittees to evaluate your tremors. The minutes record a unanimous appetite for expiation. Somewhere in the rafters, a pair of translucent twins confer in a dialect of sparks. They exchange gavels. They exchange masks. Their laughter resembles typewriter keys striking bone.
Fanaticism flowers with sacerdotal hygiene. It bathes. It trims its nails. It recites aphorisms with the tonal gravity of scripture. Mercy appears in the docket as a clerical error. You excise it. You experience a tremulous lucidity, a clarity so acute it resembles frostbite. The red planet’s influence circulates through your capillaries, an iron catechism. Every thought bifurcates. Every motive acquires a doppelgänger who whispers that discipline requires spectacle.
Revenge germinates inwardly, a carnivorous orchid cultivated in the thoracic greenhouse. You fashion an adversary from mirrors and social rumor. Identity arrives by affidavit: the gaze of colleagues, the archived opinions of strangers, the spectral tribunal of imagined readers. They annotate your posture. They litigate your breathing. You internalize their jurisprudence until your silhouette feels externally authored. In the margins of your diary, you glimpse a footnote that claims to be you.
The narrative convulses. A dream intrudes: a municipal library where the shelves are vertebrae and each book murmurs your name in divergent accents. You wander the stacks, seeking an index to absolution. The catalogue yields only cross-references to further accusations. A custodian with twin faces offers you a mop saturated in carmine. You understand that the stain is antecedent to the spill.
Awakening performs no rescue. The room persists in a slightly oblique geometry. The desk elongates toward an eschaton of paper. You practice passive resistance against your own hunger for pardon. You fast from tenderness. You cultivate martyrdom as a horticultural art. The body becomes an archive of abstentions: clenched jaw, scapular ache, the sternum’s phosphorescent throb. Outside the window, a siren keens with operatic fervor; inside, a more intimate alarm rehearses apocalypse on a cellular scale.
Politics insinuates itself into the bloodstream. You perceive how identities are minted in the furnaces of opinion, how reputations circulate as currency, how the self becomes a referendum. Under the twin sign, discourse fractures into antiphony. You argue with yourself in impeccably footnoted paragraphs. You indict the culture that taught you this jurisprudence of self-laceration. You indict your complicity in its replication. Each sentence splits into a corridor with two exits, both leading deeper into the edifice.
Another interruption: hallucination. The harbour returns as a desert of oxidized waves. Ships stand upright like obelisks inscribed with your misdemeanors. The sky peels back, revealing a palimpsest of constellations that rearrange into a red ideogram. It resembles a mouth. It speaks your childhood nickname with sacerdotal tenderness. You feel a vertiginous tenderness toward your own fragility. The tribunal pauses. A tremor of amnesty flickers across the docket.
The twins confer again. One carries a blade honed on syllables. The other bears a needle threaded with dawn. They hover above your manuscript. They revise a single line: the sentence that declared you irredeemable. The ink shivers, rearranges its atoms. The geography remains unstable; the plot meanders through corridors without cartography. Yet within the ferric luminescence, amid the bureaucratic cruelty and apocalyptic murmuration, a clandestine tenderness persists, an insurgent footnote that refuses erasure.
Jupiter continues its transit. Gemini continues its bifurcation. You continue, paradox incarnate, both executioner and archivist, both captive and cartographer of the labyrinth. The courtroom dims. The harbour exhales. In the red afterglow, you inscribe a marginal gloss: Identity remains negotiated. The twins seal the page with a sigil of ash and ember.
Healing is possession. Knowledge is invasion.
The body, once pliant, is no longer yours.
The mind, once solitary, is no longer yours.
Every heartbeat is an echo of forces you cannot name, every thought a corridor through which some alien presence walks.
And yet, the miracle compels you to continue, to live, to marvel.
And in that marvel lies the terror, the exquisite, unrelenting terror, of knowing that life itself is no longer your own, but a canvas for currents that move unseen, endless, and merciless.
There exists, in certain regions of the world – and more precisely, in certain regions of the mind – a sensation so subtle and so specific that language, that crippled engine of comprehension, struggles to name it.
But let us make an attempt.
Imagine solitude not as a lack of company, but as a presence – a presence so patient, so preternaturally attuned to your inwardness, that it begins to mimic the cadence of your thoughts, the pitch of your memories, the rhythm of your sighs. At first, you mistake it for introspection. But then it lingers. It does not leave. And it begins to suggest things.
This form of solitude is predatory.
And the architecture of the universe has always accommodated such predators. Their true forms are not monstrous but intentional. They feed not on flesh but on that delicate illusion we call the self, slowly unweaving its fibers until we are left as empty as a Roman centurion whose body is found intact, but whose personhood has been evacuated by something that wore a woman’s shape.
These predators do not devour out of hunger, nor malice. They enact a rite as old as the first shiver to pass down the spine of an ape staring too long into the dark between the trees.
To be alone is to be recognized.
To be recognized is to be selected.
And to be selected is to participate in a pageant not of passion, but of disintegration – a ceremonial dissolution in which the ego, that brittle artifact of evolutionary misfortune, is unmade by what it can never comprehend. In such rituals, desire is merely the velvet glove, the lure. What lies beneath is function: the inexorable correction of a species that dared imagine permanence.
In this light, the empusa is not a monster.
She is a mercy.
Or worse: an inevitability.
And the outpost? The fortress in the mountains, unmarked and unmourned?
A place outside time where the universe momentarily peels back its mask and whispers, This is the arrangement. You are not meant to endure.
The light grew heavier, thickening until it pressed against my skin. I could feel it entering me, 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 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.
