30 November 2011

Prose IV [Fragment of a possible larger work; Back catalogue]

There was a pause—a perfect silence. Then:

"I wish to see galaxies.... I want to go out, up there, and leap across light years—as one leaps from stone to stone across a brook—to be able to see the variegated emissions of nebulæ and the terrible seconds of the last throes of moribund, billion-year stars.... What I would give to drift into the jet-streams of distant pulsars—just so I could feel their dance...."

Elizabeth uttered no words: her mind was stretched and her eyes, lost—she listened.

"Sometimes, when I'm alone, I hold imagined planets before me; and I am impossibly astronomical in size and consequence.... And then sometimes I fall...crushed...with strange overwhelming sorrow and...ravening longing. Tears have come to my eyes when I've realised...when I understand...that I will never, ever really see these things. The universe will always be but an intangible delight bound to my mind and its eye, resident to my transient dreams and...recurring reveries."

Even farther away and nearer than she had ever been before, Elizabeth suddenly, inexplicably, felt warm—replete with a sensation of which she could not make sense. This she had never experienced before. But still she kept her silence, said nothing.

Nothing—just this feeling deepening and branching everywhere in her, blasting her a million times slowly pulsing, marathon swells. Nothing—she simply held him closer, firming her embrace with arms and hands that she would've noticed were trembling were they not wrapped round his torso as they lay together in deferent darkness. Nothing—except her immediately knowing, with sublime clarity, that she never wanted to let him go; that love was no longer a confused concept, but now an absolute with pinions imperially outspread, revealed to her in this moment of silent searing.

M.M. — Aprilis MMX

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