Stranger, can you feel me in this night of unbecoming? My stranger, myself?
Strangeness, you’re an exotic perfume, reminiscing omniscience.
It never lasts, this strangeness. You can’t save it. You take it in, and just as you start to let it be, it becomes familiar. Where did the perfume of strangeness go? How did the strangeness fade, all this incitement receding until we can’t sense anything at all?
How this fresh, newborn, awakened moment, in all its strangeness, sinks like a flower out of season into the infertile soil of habit. How we acclimatize so as to rest unprovoked, adjusting to anesthetize, habituating the shock of being alive. For what? To survive?
Is it gravity or misconception that pulls this strangeness out of the miracle of the newly-seen, into the bargain basements of Amphetamine? What filter is bred into this flesh that has the power to dull the brilliance of universal light into limited gradations of boredom?
Stranger here and stranger still.
Strange this great, universal silence – louder even than noise – that calls us to another kind of rest.
Strange this longing, older than time itself, that pulls all things into itself like a black hole swallowing a galaxy. Feel its power: resistance is futile. You think you’re falling until you break through the barrier of time and find yourself perfectly still.
Stranger are you, my enemy, my friend, beloved. Here, in the momentous gaze of existence in flesh, cherishing the living miracle of touch.
Strange this body, how it mutates through coded cycles, without permission, insouciant to glory, benign to interference, but somehow confused by the vain. Strange how it knows indestructibility even as we train in separation and fear. Strange how it feels us arrive, sulking some time as lessons unlearn the habit of masking the bliss of being alive. Here, in flesh: that strange, familiar kiss in the emptiness – the kiss of life.
So, the strangeness is familiar and sometimes, suddenly, the familiar is strange, as the longing goes on and on: a centripetal pulling into the core of epiphany.
Home. The sublime home before all homes; where familiarity and strangeness implode: the home we never leave.
Perchance pulled astern into the kingdom of heaven.
