It feels like a tug from another world. One moment, my life makes sense, the pieces my senses feed me all fit together with a satisfying click. The next, I lose my balance.
A standing fall, a wave of vertigo, and everything tilts imperceptibly.
I know where I am, but where am I really?
These people are my friends, but who are they really?
I know who I am, but…no. I don’t. Not at all.
But I keep smiling. I act like it all still makes sense. I keep the disorientation and distrust from coloring my face.
It passes eventually. It always does. Yet every time the tide recedes, it erodes a little more of my faith in this world.
I start to wonder, does everyone insist so fervently in the reality of their senses because they too are trying desperately to convince themselves?
Or is it just me?
They look at me so strangely when I comment on how fragile this world is, like it’s shaking, on the verge of collapse—like it wants to collapse—a house of cards yearning for the cruel wind to release it from the tension holding it together.
What would you expect me to do when confronted by Her?
She is the eternal night. She is the cruel wind, ready to make a mockery of this whole charade.
When She kisses me, I feel the weight of inevitability on Her lips. I taste the end of all things on Her tongue.
I have wasted away in a desert my whole life, and She is the oasis I never knew existed. Cool water washes down my dusty throat for the first time. She forces it past my cracked lips and parched tongue like She knows how much I missed this.
She is the most real thing I have ever known, all that could ever matter, and I wrap my arms around Her, pressing my whole body against Hers, terrified that this moment might ever end, while She makes of me a drowning and grateful woman.
I drink. My lungs burn.
I drink. My bones creak from the strain of Her gift.
I drink. My skin stretches taut and transparent, oozing and tearing.
I drink. I lose myself in it. The ephemeral self I once clung to washes away like footprints in the sand.
Still I drink.
She fills me with the agony of apotheosis, my body just another sketch on the tissue paper of this world, something to be ripped apart if I am to be reified and join Her.
When our lips part, She remains with me. Her Sight remains with me.
She offers me the chance to punish this world that made me suffer, or to share Her blessing with those who please me.
There will be ample time for both before She finishes tearing this world asunder.