I'm being cradled. Orbs of light or chains, I can never tell. Held up against a blackness so complete in it's expanse that my chest weeps against it's cavity. I am extraordinary in my nothingness. A star as bleak as any other. Dimmed by the distance between my speckishness and the nearest reflection of fire. Orbiting, or being orbited?, until the pull began. A gravity amid the vacuum, a weightless release, and then a plummet.

I fell through voices pleading, begging, wailing, laughing, longing, singing. I fell through the warm wet of blood spilling from open hearts. I fell through sorrow and joy and loss and infinity. Each dimension bathed me in a new fire, each it's own unique spectrum of itself. A concept of eternity began to form in me and I thought surely I must be in it. But contrary to infinity, the falling quietly stopped. There was no jolt of impact or crash of pain and fear, just a ceasing. I lay perfectly still, feeling the forgotten, neglected pieces of my body breathing and pulling themselves together. Then a voice.

I stepped into the light and they gasped with the immediacy of my unexpected presence. The glory of the sun and stars rolled into me and turned the innocuousness away like pulling cobwebs back. And there I was. Smashed porcelain welded back together with white iron, a mask of each tiny emotion that trickled through the former rivulets to shine through. They cowered then in a vision they could not undo or ignore. I was more than they knew, I was more than I ought to have been, I was reflecting a chorus of secret prayers.

I lie on a shore at low tide. I'm waiting, I think, for the distant sound of water to creep nearer until I am surrounded completely. I will stare at this sky until the liquid snakes across my eyes and into my body and I cease to know what a sky is. Then I will have come clear. Then I will no longer remember why there was such a tightness in the core. I will forget what it was that drove me to that sandy stretch and why I laid my sorrow across it like a sheet across a sleeping woman. A Victorian tragedy in soft marbled moonlight breathing imperceptibaly until it stops. Until it grinds to a stone halt, suddenly and almost surprisingly like a body being jerked off the ground by a rope it didn't know was draped around it's neck. The roaring water in my ears pulses the sound of a thousand miles of sea from the deepest abyss across submerged dunes and up the gentle slope to my angled, lilting body. And that is when I hear the song, the music that comes when the crashing is so far behind. The muffled voices of mermaids.

...

There is a still part of the day when nothing has crept back in and I know myself. The air sits on my skin like an old friend’s embrace and I can feel what I am without questioning or second guessing. The danger comes from thinking it will stay, that quiet perfect hazy sun risen moment.

And then it rolls forward. The weight of half a galaxy cradles me so soft that some days I can almost forget it is my burden. I breathe relentlessly against my will, they grow shallow and weak before staggering unexpectedly like an elephant out of my mouth, dragging my heart beats from the bottom of my stomach and forcing them to do the labor of slaves in a diamond mine. Blood pulses out of time with my thinking, reflexively four-four measuring out the pints in first trickles and later in ore hot gushes. And then it is still again.