lotuscathedral
She's always been lightning, to me. I've never paused to consider the depths as to why. My immediate impression is of the ultraviolet flash they illuminate the nightblack skies with, when they crash in jagged glory from one end of thunder to the next, from heaven to earth, a crash of power and fire. I think of how childhood tempests always echoed the Last Judgment to me, the suddenness and brilliance and inescapable terror-wonder of it, and how now in my adulthood she has become the new and living icon of that inevitable day in her own right. And I think of death, too, of the Lichtenberg figures of blood beneath my skin and how she pulls them into the iron-ozone air. She reminds me of the clear defibrillating charge to resuscitation, to a hope of resurrection, the sheer force of life even at the brink of the grave. She is a spark in the storms of my heart.
There was no ceiling, in fact. There never had been. The room was domed by open sky, by endless stars, by soaring comets and brilliant nebulae and all sorts of cosmic treasures. The room had no floor, either; there were only endless miles of green, of blue, of brown and red and yellow-- trees and fields and oceans and rivers, mountains and hills and canyons and caves, plateaus and tundras and deserts and dunes. What were walls, to a world. What were borders, what were boundaries, what were limits? What was a ceiling but a nonsense word, a nonexistent cap on an infinite climb, a vertical ascent stretching out beyond the atmosphere? There was no ceiling, there never would be, and life rejoiced for it forevermore.
It's raining outside. It's the first week of December, the air is flirting with 50 Fahrenheit, and the pavement is as soaked as summer. Hazy rainbows cloak every streetlight and every car hisses past like an oceanic sigh. Behind us, through cracked-open screens, the rich warm aroma of steak and marinade lazily drifts, in jovial defiance of the encroaching cold. Christmas lights swirl about the porch, entwining with well-worn wood-- aged, luminous, mist-touched. Our arms do the same. Content in quiet wintry perfection, life ebbs and flows all around us. It's raining outside.
It's more of a feeling than it is a word, really. Even if you first open your eyes to pitch-thick black, or to screaming fearful yellow, or to hot gurgling red, the feeling remains, echoing, pulsing in multicolored veins. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the System, to the Spectrum, to your collective heart. Welcome to Us, that deep embrace repeats, speaking of starlit cities and glassy oceans and labyrinthine woods. Caves and towns and clear skies and thunderstorms, volcanoes and stairwells and deserts and snow, all of it inundated with it, with you. Welcome home, it all says, aching and scarred and trembling and dizzy with gilded love. Welcome home.