Precipice of Presence
To the sky, and the dirt. The confusion that is time and what we hold beyond the present moment; a disease.
Count your stars every night. A saying rings vigorously inside millions of ears, yet few come to understand its deeper meaning. You cannot possibly count them all in this desert. In a cubic inch of the sky, there are hundreds of glowing orb dusts, and I sit here and count them every night, ending up with something far unfamiliar than a number.
Recently, I counted many, many stars, more than ever. I felt the lens capture the dust inside my eyes before the sun rose, and for this effort, I flaunted my ability secretly to myself. A reward like a swell of gold within my aura. An achievement beyond anything I could have challenged for myself. It felt like heaven on earth; the language of the ringing in my ears was so clear. Then, one night, I looked down. I got distracted by the sand.
The sun slowly appeared, and my feet dug deeper, caressing the stars below with the leather-like skin of my human paw. I have counted the stars at night, and now, in the day, I count the grains of sand below my feet. A different challenge, but not one I deem more or less difficult. The grains were muted yet shaped and multicolored, just like the sky when the sun greets the person below me on the other side of the world, and the moon takes a transient hue above.
It only took a full two sunrises for my gold to evaporate. My achievements and memories of the stars faded. I hardly looked up anymore; it was terrifying. When I remember how looking up made me feel, it was too calm. Unfamiliar with being so light, to be someone to hold the secrets dust above, held, and to be unable to communicate this light to anyone. For what does it mean to hold a sacred desire if I cannot share it? People thought of me as outside of themselves.
But everyone around me knows about the sand. We talk about the sand the way it feels beneath our feet, how it looks, and one person even mentioned how it tastes. We all took a swallow, sharing the same experience and arguing over the validity of our mouths’ feel.
These people are not like the stars. There is iron in my aura now; it all feels so heavy, yet comfortable. Familiar. I look around, and I am everyone else.
One of the people told me, Thank you for helping us all see the sand. I wanted to cry, rip my face apart, and throw it to the heavens so it may sprinkle my salty tears from the sky to prevent an infinite c-spine of these people. I did nothing! You were standing on it all along. If I wanted to help you see, I'd tell you to look up! Look up!
My feet ran before the rest of my body could understand why, or where. At a cliff at the edge of the city, I screamed and screamed, and the sand spewed from my lungs with dusty scratches. I heard nothing, no sound erupted to prove my rage. I was coughing up blood, the coppery ink ran down my chin, my neck, my bare breasts, and I fell to the earth, hardly breathing.
Still choked, darkness arose. And there was not a single star in the sky. The solitude was whole and chaotic, yet peaceful. The moon was too bright in the middle of the sky, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. So I started over. This time not counting, just gazing, noticing that when the moon moved, so did the stars, each night so different. I was iron, I was gold. At the same time, yet never all at once. I was love, and loved. At the same time, and yet never all at once. A being ever at the precipice of presence.