It all vanishes. Cares, loves, thoughts, light, darkness. All gone.
I feel the sky pull me and at the same time disappear, gravity is gone and yet I fall. I can feel it all rushing past me. Cold, hot, pressure, vacuum. The speed is obliterating.
Cells die, I hear them scream, I feel their death agonies ripple through me. My soul aches with the stress. The darkness rises, then recedes. Without light there is no darkness, without shadow there is no light. In a world of total grey shades, nothing is distinct. I am indistinct. I come apart, I am not. A world of grey, I am grey. I can not define where I end. Billowing drifts of self abut against me. I abut against myself and do not know it. Infinitely referential, I am spun out, de-threaded, deconstructed. I ... not I.
A man comes.
But not a man, no man this. A figure, unrecognisable, threadlike, tenuous and frail. Ropey and strong he picks me up. Suddenly I have a sense of self. The grey eats at me, I dissolve. He does not, he gives me identity. I know what I am not. I am not him. I am not it. I am not grey.
The clouds part and shift about us, trailing fingers float over and through my non-being, my dissolving self comes with me, I see it fluttering behind me. Kites of reality unthreading themselves from the skein of this place. Long drawn filaments unwinding and wavering in the not-breeze that drags me apart even as I am drawn away.
"Hush", he soothes me. The pain lessens.
I condense. Long rivers of chaos collapse into wisps of order, wisps wind about other wisps and collapse into being. Strings of feathery self ignite.
I am. Once more.
The pain is excruciating. The pain is supremely defining. I understand. Life. Pain. One and the same. I feel his fingers on me, in me. Penetrating my deepest parts, lacerating my most sensitive moments, dredging the very borders of me, searching. What is he searching for?
“Worth,” he says without pause, "virtue, folly, function, perplexity, cognition, recollection, capacity."
"Capacity? Capacity for ..."
"Humanity," he utters, fingers inveigled in between my darkest and brightest moments.
A distant light flares, in this place of no-light and no-shadow, it is a shocking event. I casts me as a shadow upon myself but he is not illuminated. I sense him, I feel him as separate from me, in some way, yet his essence is spread through me, searching still.
Love, it is love I feel for him, selfless and incoherent love. We are the same. We are unlike each other in the most primal parts. I am more of him, he is more of me. It is confusing. The distant light flashes a second time, a defining strobe throughout the universe. All is undefined in its harsh illumination.
"Return," it is not a word he utters, it is not a thought he conceives, it is an inevitability, a statement of fact.
"Remember," he says.
Gravity, I feel gravity, dragging, heavy, horrid and irresistible. I slip from his hands, through his hands, between his hands. Sliding and oozing, I coalesce and fall.
Like a raindrop, I recede. He recedes, sorrow, but he lets me go.
I want to stay.
Does a raindrop choose its path? Does a gas cloud choose where it drifts?
I am ablated by the passage, friction tears at me, heat scorches me. I huddle tight to myself and compress.
Like a rock I fall. Pressure hits and threatens to tear me apart, or compress me. I shout for structure.
A third strobe of light, the brightest yet! So blinding that I press my eyes closed against its radiance. I am physically buffeted by it. It shapes me. It defines me. Even through closed eyelids I see myself. Arms, legs, eyelids. Gravity is overwhelming, crushing, drawing, streaming.
Screaming.
Screaming and the plates are cold on my skin, the road hard and gritty on my back. Something is broken inside me, I feel it grate against itself as I draw breath to scream again. Something plastic and harsh is pressed against my face. A chemical stink enters me, a bitter naphtha taste fills my mouth and scorches my throat. I burn and involuntarily gasp, and I am gone.
Hospital sheets, antiseptic stink, the tube clogs my throat, a giant plastic phallus thrust deep into me. I drag at it but it is wedged tight, I breathe anyway. Struggling with nausea I open my eyes, and you are there. Tears in your eyes, your hands on my hand, cradled like a broken bird in your grasp.
"We ... we thought we'd lost you. You hit ... hit the road so hard ... I thought ..." you gasp, tears rolling down your face. Tears of relief, tears of joy.
Something trickles down my face, my own tears.
You smile. I cannot. I seem Him, feel Him, parts of Him, in you. I will send you there, I will send you to his bosom, so you can feel what I feel, so you can love Him too. You will all love him, you will. Then He will take me back.
I smile.