True Story

Some kids go to the
Salt Flats and
Decide to Walk With Their Eyes Closed
on the way back
to the Car

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 wandered towards distant highway lights. An obstinately flat, chalky desert yawned silently in all directions, blanketing pieces of life for a seeming eternity of space, the disorienting levelness arousing the curse of dimensionality. It was that bizarre time of night that doesn't yet have the blueish tint of a new day but is chillingly stale and no longer holds the mystery of a new darkness. A wind, bloated on the past, ruffled their hairs and armfuls of blankets and then traveled on, keeping it's face close to the ground as though it were searching, searching for more than the bits of salt that it picked up and carried on into the vast empty nothingness only to be dropped unceremoniously when the wind, it's quarry eternally elusive, dissolved into the air.

Someone looks up and feels the sky gently pushing down on their face, as if it were an old, leaden curtain. Inside their mind the sky keeps falling, slowly spiraling, dropping down to the white salt and then gently splitting vertically and parting to present a deserted white stage, set for the first act.

A girl closes her eyes. Walking with eyes closed is freeing, for in the mercilessly bare landscape there is a trembling undercurrent of timeless quietus, the constant reminder of a heaviness in mortality, a reminder readily pushed into her brain by the dense wind. The blankness can be overwhelming, and she shuts her eyes in part to keep from blending into nothing. The wind moves through her ears as tendrils of air gently exploring the inner canals, and though she first resists it, their pressure changes to a numbing sort of hum, like vibrating microbes in water that lulls her fear. The tendrils move silkily over her face like water currants. They reach into the weighty sky as it settles on her as the weight of the ocean. Drowsiness of a day dissolves and she bounces gently with every step. The salt in her nose, tangy like blood, becomes the salty water she breathes. She reaches out her hands to brush against seaweed, soft and alive, slimy with the excrement of life. Her mind's eyes open and she sees ripples of colorful bodies, shimmers of slithering tails fleeing into violet rocks, pink tinged coral, tangerined flowers. The sand glows with a rosy health, glinting softly as the light of a rippling sun splashes and spills all over the floor. This slanting light sometimes flares sharply and then dies as the water soothes its fragmented movement to the seafloor. The sea is silence, a silence forever moving, pushing, groaning and undulating, the rhythmic pulsation occasionally punctured by otherworldly echoes and yawning cries. As the pulse of the ocean rocks the plants into a drowsy dance but not quite to sleep, the girl smiles and is alive.

Someone looks up at the glinting glaze slathered over the dense sky. Once it was said that the heavens created a sort of music or hum that only the poetically sensitive could hear. But poets are the least poetical of all creation and as the glaze pierces their eyes and pulls them in deep, a tuning fork taps on a star and the orchestra prepares for the second act.

A boy closes his eyes. Every crunching step he feels vibrating from his feet into his chest, a shaking sort of pound that threatens to jar his heart from its delicate place between his lungs. He has felt this pound from the quaking wind, bloated with his life's past, pushing on his chest, bending in his sternum so that his insides become shrunken and deformed. But now he lets the black under his eyelids close in around him and the pounding fades until only his heart beats dimly. He breathes. In place of the cold, heavy wind a shimmering but indifferent heat gently enfolds him. The air smells singed and the ashes of its cremation from the baking warmth cling to the fine hairs in his nose. The skin on his arms and neck prickle with the heat of a sun close and torrid. Softly his feet shuffle along a dirt road, the fine sand powdering his feet and rubbing between his toes. He looks up into a chalky blue sky and then into the sun. The glare is so real that he can almost touch the rays of sunlight as they fall from the heavens to redden his eyelids and lips. Their taste is at once as familiar as milk and as indescribable as salt; a taste like the smell of his pillows when they had been warmed all afternoon by summer sunshine through his bedroom windows. Traveling quickly across the languid air is the sound of a hand bell, rung slowly and deliberately. He turns to the sound and sees a temple, blazing gold and white in the sunlight, searing his eyes but holding them captive with its delicate beauty. Hovering just above the ground, it looks as though it had been built on fine filaments of gold, each reaching towards the white fire of light. The bell sings out again, strong and steady, inviting him inside, pulling his feet towards the small black opening and without a conscious step or motion, he finds himself inside semi darkness. Incense drips from the air, not only filling his nose and lungs, but his limbs and his mind. The calling bell envelops him and he is serene.

Someone looks up into the dizzying swirls of the thick wind and gazes as it reaches down to their face to pull the breath from inside their nostrils. Inside their mind the wind gently takes breath from others, sometimes pulling just enough to gather a glowing human soul that momently satiates its ever-bloated belly. Slowly, gradually, the glowing lights dim for the third act.

A boy closes his eyes. There was a time, in a dream, when the cool air pushed up his limbs and his 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. When he awoke he tried to hold the feeling in his stomach, the sparkling sensation of what he had experienced but he couldn't recall the word, the word that would reconstruct his escaping bliss. But here, in this changeless, ageless patch of earth, an empty place that moans inexhaustibly of past and present, he remembers. And as the thought rises, becoming clearer and more distinct as it rushes from his unconscious, the leaden wind, following the motion of his thought, lifts his hair and his navel. Fillings his lungs in surprise, he feels that the air has become light, rid of any traces of mortality. The light in his chest, released as he exhaled, explodes in the indistinct space and becomes sky, alive in motion and loudly displaying spilled inks, splashed colors and dimension. He breathes again, smelling sweet dampness and feels the spectrum of light bouncing around in his nose and lungs springing from the droplets of water he takes in. Light and deep blue moves on him, like hands of a gentle, practiced mother, urging him to release his feet from the ground that is no longer there. His feet float up behind his hips, his legs stretching to follow. He extends his arms far, far out in front of his eyes and sails away, enfolded into all the weightless space and he is nothing.

The buzzing lights of the highway glow in a yellow, artificial way. The group stops and opens their eyes, their faces shadowed and jaundiced from being lit from above. The air is cold, but doesn't seem quite the same. They look at each other with a new understanding, all feeling as if they had been jolted awake after a falling dream.

Imagine Georges Lemaitre Gazing from his Bible
into the heavens and giving a nod to the old understanding
He Cannot Account For Existence
and then Suddenly, like a Flash of car lights illumination some dark room of his mind
Seeing in a Single
atom
all of Creation