Sign of Signs

Heartless and in terror, time passes, with calamitous hands, with ruinous, gaping visage, eyes cold like signstones. The falling water, the infinite rotary momentary pinpricks and mountains and emotions. Imperturbable in its eternity, indescribable in its complexity, heartless and hopeless and neverending.

It is cold here. I am cold of moment, of heart. I am cold of purpose; my eyes shine from the falling water, and are there answers here? Do the hurtling clouds move with more volition than this, the ever-hopeless?

In exhaustion, I sink down beneath the water, silver, wasting waves that eat out my strength, bore into my muscles, swim into my ears until even my bowels are swimming. Beneath the argent film, through the hiding murk, towards loneliness and perhaps even eternal piece. I breathe water, its scent now comforting and hateless; my fear, gone; my curiosity wisened and awake; I am free from want, from the hunger that has plagued me the past days and weeks, given to the shining, evanescent deeps.

And further than my field of visions, away from my most distant sight or the shatteredest borders of my wariness.

There is a gate. With its sight-blinding, holy determination.

I was lost at the feet of these waters, at shameful hanging the sign of the eternal student above my eyes, weight bowed under shoulders of malachite.

Is this home? The heavenly light congealing in the depths, the stolen brilliances of a million stars, caught here beneath the drowning waters. The milky-burning sun that I can know but never see and never reach. I hope for an epiphany, for a conflagration, of a way to burn my way through the invisible choking air. But there is naught. I am wretched, lame, taught by my search. But it is a single page in an empty library.

I breach, break the surface; alone, and far from death.

Where will I go from here? I cannot stay, never so close again. I travel, fleeing this travail and certain brightness, making grim way to the blind-ghosts of the shores. Again on dry land I lay down amidst the sightless, again I find myself home once more.