11-16-2021

FAR FUTURE, BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR - In empty skies, grey storms of late afternoon, chill of an impending storm descending ominously over the tropical landscape beyond, I awoke alone. Laying still in bed, I could see the shore, a sliding glass door that opened out to descend to the beach, waves crashing grey, a fjord’s foaming break on the sand, the aquarian blue only a distant memory of sunrise forgotten and obscured. Beneath the growing stormclouds, the sun was descending terminally, below the horizon to nothing beyond, no moon, meet the horizon and end of sentence. I could see the tundra stretching beyond the ocean, the desert that gets colder and colder, an Earth without sunlight, the long sleep where we trudge on, awake every last minute as our skeleton is stripped bare in the cold as cold as cold can get, the same pain forever until we forget what warmth is… I’m waiting, watching the stormclouds, waiting for the chaos. Waiting for the world to be without form and void, waiting for a violence below God, the violence before divinity, tearing all to dust and ash of the terminal tundra beyond the ocean without form and void.

I pull myself out of bed, sick with three kinds of DT and a hangover, reaching for a gun, beltloop jeans, I’m in panties and a shirt, goosebumps and insects. I ignore the window and stumble. I can’t find my brother. The hallway is all sickly paleblue light of fluorescence and firearms, powder burning out every last receptor and the world turned grey, groping in the desert, sobriety that cuts like raw wind on a mountaintop, man and the sun alone before sand and snow, a horizon that goes on forever, an emptiness so total you lose position. I was rising up whenever I was here, stripped naked like sandblasted glass, tormented and newborn. I watched my brother descend while I was helpless in the world of the saints as he plumbed the depths of a cave which had no return, into a darkness so thick it stifled even the mention of light, a depth that inverted itself into a whole new world on a spectrum of light our eyes can’t perceive, seeing only the motion in total darkness.

Where am I? This hotel was built years ago. Every door ajar I can smell dust and stale piss. Sheets in a tangle, door open, pacific breeze still wafting in, sand dappled over the trampled carpet. It must be millennia ahead of time, an ocean below a stormy sky portending evil about to blossom like life from the deepest waters, waters upon waters without light, a dead sea waiting for a Cambrian Age. After hell. After the thunder descends. After the lightning strikes the surface, pen to paper “AND THERE WAS LIGHT” and maybe something alive can bloom. Tomorrow. The night is only beginning, purple and black clouds swelling where the pale water and sand ends. There’s so much darkness left to go. A long journey sailing onto the abyss through the leviathan’s mouth waves that crash against waves. The night will only get darker. I’ll be an old woman by the time sunrise comes, tropical light and shell bikinis and frond plates to eat dripping-wet fruits by the light of the sand. Tomorrow. The young kids will pass before me, sitting on a lawnchair looking like some old relic, some aura behind my eyes terrifying them. They look at me and know I was alive when it was night. I saw it get dark. Look too deeply at my wrinkled skin and you might get sucked in, wake up with me in the hotel, be here, someplace you don’t want to be, watching the night descend at the end of the day. Watching the world fall once again into the Leviathan’s mouth. Black and darker, chaos upon chaos, magic novel at first goes from gentle waves to crashing tsunamis, drowning in the abyss, my soul glowing like a fangtooth amidst the saturnine water. I see a vision of the gentle children, dolphins and starfish thriving on sunlight, terrified and humbled before a giant squid like me. A sperm whale like my brother. Bleached by darkness, the unfortunates born with enough magic in our blood to taste the brine.