And there, in the sinkhole,
Condemned by thought,
Wallowing,
Breathless,
Consumed by the taste of it—the hint of it,
The fragrance of what you've given in full to all the others.
It sucks the air from me—draws out of me the breath that sustains my life.
——
My senses are in disarray.
They stick to my lips and my tongue.
I feel the weight of them.
The weight of sensations?
Surely it's impossible to feel a taste, to scent a taste, to pick up the fragrance of a sense of movement by its taste?
And that's the worst—that taste of fragrance is the worst.
But it must be possible—I suspect it, but I still feel it.
My senses are confused, but still I know that this is really happening.
Yes, it is, of course it is, I reel with it all, fall sideways with all those dizzying, mismatched, ridiculous combinations.
One moment I'm swimming in the swirling shimmers of a shallow, warm, and crystal shore.
The shiny pebbles, glinting in the sun, reflecting against my skin.
The scintillating magic of it all.
Delightful.
A sense of the never ending—the eternal.
The wonderful impossibleness of change in a timeless world.
Could this be perfection of being?
Could this be…
Then suddenly,
So suddenly,
A dark shape,
At first unseen,
Then, with no pause to think—no gap in the unchanging movement—a shadowy hand,
At first, an image only,
Then, as quickly as it appeared as a shape, its weighty form bears down.
A heavy, grasped-tight fist of fingers threatening to crush me.
Then it opens--spreading out,
And I'm scooped up by it,
Squeezed hard,
Held fast,
Moved through space, then dropped into the darkness of the bottomless sinkhole where now I flounder.
For a moment I can think of the shallows again—but only for a moment.
The water is so dark,
Heavy pressure,
Filled with creatures,
Lurking,
Glowing,
Luminescent,
Lying in wait in shadowy holes,
Staring out with pale forbidding eyes on stalks.
Phantoms.
Lapping their long tongues that, even in the watery depths, drip with their slimy saliva.
I kick against their snapping, and their biting, as they slither back and forth, eel-like, at the entrances to their lairs.
And I wallow,
Barely even that,
Helplessly fighting to reach what is only a distant image of the surface,
To swim back into the shallows,
But all the time being held back, confused and spinning, dragged down into the dark and terrifying horrors of the writhing, monster-filled deep.
And then, a gasp of breath.
Air.
At last a breath—the breath of another.
Again that taste,
But fleeting,
For me it's only a passing taste of that you have given in full to those who now live in the pressured waters of the deep.
And so I taste those tastes of sorrow as, relentlessly, I'm drawn down deeper, ever deeper into the dreadful sinkhole.
And now, held not by the snapping jaws or the grasping talons of those wall-eyed beasts, but by the sheer gravity of the darkness that lies beneath my flailing feet.
——
And as I sink—as I'm drawn down—my mind won't stop, the thoughts won't stop.
How, I think, can the sweetest taste be so bitter?
How, I think, can the sweetest movement be so cruel?
