As I sat there listening to the roaring of her voice, knowing that behind me there was a jungle of life, and in front of me an ocean of time,
I could see the immensity in front of me; and behind me, the void. Everything and nothing behind me––just empty space. All that there was, was the ocean before me. All I could hear were her stories, but the stories kept coming one after the other. The images of origins and endings, beginnings and nevermores were here inside me and outside of me, and as the ocean was inside my mind, bursting it open, I couldn’t tell the difference between the ocean in me and the ocean outside.
I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what I was hearing. Voices came and went until every word, and every concept, and every memory lost any proportion and meaning. It was just sounds until no longer could I remember who or what I was, what I was hearing, what was she saying––only that reverberation that was felt through skin and spine, only the wailing until nothing else could be had, until that point of reference which is I was barely there.
Yeah. There I was, just a point of view, barely there. I, perceiving the ocean, hearing the stories. The almost I. The barely I. The uncreated. The eternal. That nothing that was not absent. That point which was ceasing to be. Unmanifested. Uncreated.
Something sat, maybe. I cannot really tell you for I did not see it sitting. There was an immensity, I believe so now. I can’t really say. For compared to what could that be an immensity?
There was a vastness that came and went that would give me moments of reprieve, when I could collect myself and think maybe enough to know myself as the teller of stories, as the thinker of thoughts, as the one who yearns for the kiss of that vastness whence I came.
I could never have enough time to consolidate this long enough before she would take me again, before my point of view would change to being a vast something that had existed from the beginning of time and will continue to exist until the end of time when the last flame in the last star goes off.
