September First

It is almost easy to imagine Georges Lemaître gazing from his Bible into the heavens and giving a nod to the old understanding that he cannot account for existence and then suddenly, like a flash of car lights illuminating a dark room of his mind, seeing the truth of reality.

On miles of white salty floors under a velvet sky that seemed to be falling slowly, like an immense tarp punctured with stars, a small group of twenty something year olds walked half drunkenly towards distant highway lights. Inside a mind the sky keeps falling, slowly spiraling, dropping down to the white salt and then gently splitting vertically and parting to present the white empty stage, set for the first act.

One girl closes her eyes. Walking with eyes closed is no danger out here, here there is nothing, and yet there could be anything... And the wind on her face feels like currants of water and the weighty sky settles on her as the weight of the ocean. The salt in her nose is the salty water she breathes and she reaches out her hands to brush against seaweed. Her mind's eyes open and she sees ripples of colorful bodies and shimmers of slithering tails, the pulse of the ocean rocking the plants into a drowsy dance but not quite to sleep.
A boy closes his eyes. There was a time, in a dream, when the cool air pushed up his limbs and belly and there was a sensation that the weight of hours was lifted, that really the only hindrance to his flight was the illusion of time, which, he remembered, is an illusion out here. And as he remembered, the heavy air lifted his hair and lifted his navel. He extended his arms far out in front of him and sailed into a milk white consciousness.