curvature

by Monkey Leap

  “When a body meets a body…”

  Morpheus has never been one to renounce a moment. This moment reflects an undivided attention to detail within a flowering of consequence. He introduces himself in the name of this empty moment, and waits - for a fidget, a makeshift rouse. And as if from a distant edge, he witnesses the intersecting portal.

  “Nova.”

  Nova looks down upon the draped form and picks up the gentle scent of lavender, a wave connecting at his center, forming an arching ache and pain that stings. He surfaces only when he suddenly recognizes his own pain is externally reflected in the presence of another.

  Morpheus is wounded by Nova’s sorrow.

  He moves out through the back door, and sits quietly in his chair.

  Nova moves out with him, and slides down the wall beside.

  Both sit in short, deep time, singular and whole.

  Apogee

  She floats slightly below the ceiling … she can no longer ascertain weight or distance, or depth. But what she does know was that she was only there because she was still trying to let go of the concept of being there. She noticed most intently that she seemed as if she were a story of plot lines, and intersections, and that it was rapidly becoming more apparent that it all was nothing more than a creation, and could be moved with the mere wave of intent. And that what she knew of “Ambrosia”, experience in a form that form now lay below her, covered in butterflies. She liked the butterflies. But she could no longer relate to the form itself, and had no feeling one way or the other about it. What she did relate to was within the form of “Morpheus”. She related quite easily to him, and he related to her. She felt comforted by his presence, and the things he felt and said to her made her less confused and more aware in her thought. She had realized she was now pure thought, the thought that created the experience that had guided her life. And she noticed that she felt drawn to nothing more, not even to the experience, as wonderfully remarkable as it now appeared. The once obvious diverging realities were now clearly delineated into waves of changing energy. And when they came in contact with one another she now could discern clearly what she had felt to be the case when she was in her body. It was all an experience of interchanging energies.

  Her end to her had no consequence, though initially she was slightly confused by her pain and the shock to her body, but that quickly started to fade, and was replaced with a sense of having already actualized beyond her body. But she could still faintly experience through her delineated senses.

  And now just here in this room she had experienced the recognition of a boy standing near her body, and she approached him, but he was thick and heavy, and confusing, but she thought something in him was like her. And then when Morpheus entered and spoke she could see a line grow out between the two. They were related - a relation of a web of invisible blueprints – of energy memories. She noticed the light thread pulsate harmoniously.

  She had the odd sense that whatever memory she had been as “Ambrosia” was fully and wholly there for all eternity. As if she had taken part as a new combination of plot lines, and intersections and diverging moments. The one exclusive accessory seemed to be she had the choice of freewill, and the ability to reflect on those choices. The choice could expand or distort this larger thought.

  She felt that this form she was now experiencing in thought would fade. She was also starting to sense that her composition, this consummation now, could be recycled. She had never felt a need for anything during her body time so she understood it was her reflected choice once again.

  Thoughts now come and go in a flash, and somehow seem almost simultaneous, even before the other is even finished, and she suddenly realizes that there is no such thing as “time.”

  The biggest sensation is space. There is so very much of it, and it is so full of more of itself within itself. She can move to those connected with her just by thought alone. She has been drawn to her mother several times, but noticed history and choices had dissolved the thread between them.

  Alternatives are starting to pop in front of her. With this starting to happen she feels herself no longer able to think in

  point space.

  In a split moment,

  she feels as if a large breath is breathing her in,

  and suddenly

  she is spread

  very far…

  Novation

  On a Sunday afternoon the television opens to a scene of stealth. Decked in the latest camouflage, blended in amongst the bushes, a man speaks softly with gun in hand. He alerts the viewer that the hunting season is close to open, and if you are not prepared you may find your shot will not ring true, so it is good practice before the season starts to go into the local forest and shoot targets. He’s explaining that squirrels are just the thing for this sort of exercise.

  With this he moves quietly out into the open, and begins viewing treetops for movement. With that he proceeds to cut squirrels out of the sky, one after another, deeper and deeper into the forest.

  With this and with that.

  “Caritas”

  Harry had challenged the road long into the day, and now was into his stopover slot, waiting for his next load. He often found himself in idle talk about the road; with polite, weathered greetings he gave quick escape. But today, Harry had tried to shift aside from several rough road warriors, but to no avail. He hadn’t seen these fellas before, and was curious to know why they brandished such a cutting edge in their demeanor. They talked a lot about freedom, and prosperity, and having your own backyard. To Harry freedom was finding a true sense of your own being, and prosperity was the feeling that came with it, and then you had your own true backyard. But this would never seem to fit into the conversation. He acknowledged whatever was spoken with a light laugh, and carried the conversation to its next mooring, in this case just to keep the moth away from the flame.

  Harry had gotten into his third coffee, on these fellas’ urgings, and long about an hour later Harry felt a need to whiz. This seemed to suddenly project a movement in same. But Harry did have that effect on people; he could move them. He could immediately bridge over their trepidation; over the kind of intimate fear people felt. Harry knew they needed to embrace something more whole, and he’d watch as they squirmed inside while outside they squeezed into an iron cast. Their only way out seemed to be to melt it away, which usually involved a drink or two or ten. And then suddenly they felt profoundly unrestrained, and relating seemed temporarily truer. The problem was that this was induced by persuasion, and persuasion always carries a price tag. Bravado was much the same. Oh it came in all shapes and sizes and needs, and you had to keep it up to convince yourself and others. Harry supposed this is why he loved his concealed secret so; it was a quiet feeling of beauty and soul and body together. When he could find souls willing to open for a little while, it was truly like a beautifully pure game of hide and seek.

  As for Harry’s “delicate” choice, no one ever needed to know. From when he was small he felt an urge to connect with beauty, the pure truth of beauty, and in and about his neighborhood there was little that was admired that way, so he became privately supplicating. He hadn’t started out liking women’s underwear enough to elicit wearing them. No sir-ree. He just liked to look at them. In truth he found them beautiful. But to admit that would have brought the house down upon him, and would have felt that way through his father’s fists. There was just something about the way they spoke openly of a secret that usually lay beneath, while gloriously wafting on a clothesline. And so Harry, knowing each particular washday, would travel the neighborhood, and drift by and watch the beautiful parade of rainbow panties ride the wind together.

  Years went by and Harry grew into manhood and with that accepted the responsibility of choice that comes with it. And in this full acceptance he donned his first pair of frillies, knowing that he had not tipped the balance, nor unduly disrupted loved ones lives by unnecessary disclosure. Harry had no hidden agenda t
o be unraveled. He just lived from a basic outline, and any attempt to understand his deeper connection to the feminine, and beauty, and the way of the symbolic and the psyche would have sent him tailspinning.

  Now Harry finds himself in a compromising position, well beyond his fears, somewhere in-between ice-cold numbness and absence of being. For as zippers came down so did the discovery of Harry’s beautiful secret, although he tried hard and quick to conceal it. The flash of hot pink and black lace was too much of an eye draw in this laughingly comfortable moment he had helped to create, and a comical thought flashed through his mind that this would have been the day for a more subtle number.

  So here now Harry lies, from blows through steel-toed boots. He must have lay alone for an eternity, because he finds himself floating throughout history, not all his own. He travels fast and far, and finds one second in India, the next in South America, the next in places he’s never seen before in any geographic show. It all seems quite natural and normal and beautiful, and as he is very well aware he can’t get up off the floor, he takes it all in stride.

  Harry has slipped into a coma.

  Crucible

  Before his time spent at the funeral home, Nova forced his body to do his mind’s bidding. These days Nova’s mind moves at an even slower determined pace then his lagging body. But now nothing has a sense of that long haul “same”.

  He finds himself wanting to follow behind his every strolling thought with deliberation and contemplation.

  He seeks out the nomadic thoughts, the ones that lay at the perimeters.

  He views from a distance large shaped and angled towns and cities and orbs of conclusions, built upon by history long dead from points now unknown. And then watches its coursing upon its dusty self in stoic ceaseless movement.

  Between it all the space remained.

  He sees these workings echoed without, all about him.

  He’d watch his family, he’d watch the people at work, he’d walk the streets and watch.

  He’d watch how the beginning slight twisted turn incarnated into a mirrored gesture conveyed in an emotion of hostility, or of detachment. Others could fold upon themselves like incoming waves. And others could leave no imprint whatsoever, only a slight whispered hint. Even those that appeared to carry the weight. They all had been built on dead foundations.

  He always looked for the moment that spoke of pure truth. Through it he could see the passing flashing sign of upcoming, and predict the outcome long before the destination – a curvature of sorts.

  He’d watch the rise and fall of it all.

  What he noticed most of all was that “New Yorkers” were existing in-between each other, on cutting edges of space. This was the type of thing that was repeated elsewhere throughout the world. But every place carries an energy that determines itself in personality, and this was New York’s. To most it appeared as a sense of an “always happening” sort of thing. It had been filled to the brim with happenings.

  But Nova had noticed that the air carried a forced restraint, an unlikely suitor for a “happening” place. The self must become king, oblivious to most, including to all. The capacity to objectify, not just to others, but also to themselves.

  The consequence of the object is always power. He recognized this immediately, as it was the most apparent in its appearance. Most people thought of power as an endowment, or stamina, or a mastery. But most power comes from inadequacies to deal with a struggling moment of outcome. Nova saw a decided objectified need in his grandfather’s murderer. He also saw the same need in himself in his anger after his grandfather’s death. Ridden long enough it became “the game of god and devil.” A personal game with only pertinent visions invited. It seemed mostly all about objectifying. He knew, for his own example, that his mother would assume the perimeter of her world an unsafe place now, that her life would become even more removed than it had been, that this incident had added a line in her head that stipulated experience in a new objective way. Before she would look to her strength of continued complaisance to get her through. Now she would look to her fears. And all around her would then adjust or conform or agree, console and coerce, or disregard. Reflected back in so many ways, she would cling even harder to her object, and if any got to close to its core she would close even tighter the circle.

  His father would become an angle, bending everything sharply upon approach. Nova saw his sister as an artist of escape – she could crawl within these cracks unnoticed, finding a hole.

  Nova saw these histories everywhere, walking and breathing with a life of their own. Created strange worlds, twisted to conform to the object. Mirrored forms far beyond any strangeness in “Alice in the Looking Glass.” But it seemed to Nova that this outer mirror was much more immutable after outcome than the inner mercurial world of reflection. And so Nova resolved to use his inner world more often to resolve his struggles than reflect it onto his outer.

  This objectified certainty in intent certainly did not diminish his own struggle with his inner observations of truth. And each time always, for a long moment he found himself clinging to the edge to save himself, or the bloated self that was now dying. He always claimed, at these particular moments, that he was worth saving, that it had not been his fault, that it all fell to circumstance, and consequence. Until finally he would become tired, of himself, and let go.

  Always he would let go. Because he found something purer in intent, unearthed and liberated. He felt himself now cutting out layers of himself that had rotted, objects that no longer held any meaning or place. And each step then seemed to release him.

  Sometimes he would watch his body become the dying ember of his mind, sifting through illness, eruptions exposing the layers.

  Slowly he became more different to himself, yet more recognizable.

  He found himself now often reflecting in the full-length mirror. When he was objectifying, this self that looked back became flat and unalterable. During those shifts in his metamorphosis he became challenged by what appeared before his opened eyes looking back. Sometimes the change was so subtle he could discern no difference, and had to train his mind to let go of all preconceptions, so its delicate clarity would become comparably apparent. Other times he glorified this freshly unique person, seeing someone he admired and held dear. Rarely did Nova know these incarnations subjectively, as he now understood they were self-contained in image only for a moment, and that this observed distinction was consciousness on some fluid surface, constantly dying to be born again in the next moment. He recalled how once he had read that Japanese artists change their names throughout their lives, understanding they are forever being reborn.

  He recalled his vision in the mirror the day leaving for the funeral.

  He pitied him now.

  Through layers this thought ricochets off its history and suddenly there seems no such thing as “time”, and Nova notices in this framework his world dissolve, and suddenly all is imagined.

 

  In this undelineated confusion he has the throw-off feeling that he can enter the mirror, and detects his protracted body putting a fingertip up against it, expecting it to melt mercury-like into the fluent surface.

  Nova suddenly wishes he could talk to Morpheus.

  Tulpa

  Grace perches herself on the edge of the bench, to give further thrust to her swing for the spread and distance of the seeds. The birds pay little vigilance to her. Few passerbys notices this seamless blending of nature.

  It had been almost thirty-five days since Charlie’s passing, and Grace filled the physical hole left with compassionate indulgence so as to understand its nature. This perhaps was the most difficult part for those left behind, she thought. That physical embodiment was no longer apparent. And so you found yourself having to adjust your mental picture of reality to each scene that suddenly was missing that player. Too far of a stretch between for the human mind to make at times, and it was only with
the gentle prodding of Charlie’s spirit that Grace remembered what this remarkable dissolve was all about. It was at these times that she would come to the park, as nature was closest in obviousness.

  And so she understood how she fumbled at times with this slow exchange in this mercurous scene. She noticed at certain interchanges that she would suddenly break down and cry for her lost Charlie, only to realize later his image was mirroring a change in her scene, and she was starting new once again.

  He had embodied to her all that she had reflected upon in her own life. He was complete, and now completed. Even now, through her, this added reflecting spoke to its own actualized life. She had heard that every thought creates a new seed of a world, and the more you concentrated on it’s specifics the more tangible it became. An imprinting with nature on nature.

  She feels very strongly that Charlie is spreading out and away now, and soon will be completely released into the whole. Just as she knew the moment he left his body, she will know the moment he is no more. Then she will collect the ashes from the funeral home, and carry them to the wind.