A photo of blue icicle lights nestled among the low angles of a honey-oak attic room. It's tucked in my wallet. The photo, not the room... though... I have opened my black leather billfold so often now to glimpse the soft focus of those lights and the romantic coaxing of those artistic angles like a personal cathedral... so often now that I have wished, so hard, that, that photo was a portal, a gateway I could step through and be *there.* Right... there... oh.
I think I need to go dancing.
And so...
The fourth club is the charm. I've driven more than a hundred miles. I've never danced here before. The music is haunting and dark, something between alt-techno and goth. I'd be laughing if the DJ weren't live and laying down beats unique and raw, danceable, entrancing. And my eyes close and my body moves, arms up, hands open, hips rolling, and you slide into place behind me.
Imagine it. Deep breath. Let go. Imagine if everything you knew was suddenly different. Not just everything you'd been taught. Not just everything you'd been told. What if everything you knew as certainty in your heart was suspect?
Wait. The music changes. You lean tight against me. I don't know you. But I saw you across the tables when I first walked in. You are wearing perfume, light, that smells like oranges and cloves. Your hair is long and straight. Your skin is moonlight beneath the pearl shimmer of a button up. You are here alone.
What if only half of what you knew changed? But the changes were random and unexpected and followed no pattern, rhyme or reason. What if you discovered lies? What if you discovered flaws? What if you discovered jewels that were connected to your ability to breathe, that you could not live without? What if you grew up, slow and easy, all along beneath a brilliant blue sky... and then you woke up one morning, and the city streets were gone, the bustle had vanished, and the sky was black. Jet black... scattered with five million stars.
You are very careful not to lay hands on me. Your hands stay above your head, which is a head and a half above mine. My shoulders to your ribs and chest, my hips against your thighs, you toss your hair and I feel strands like ribbons of satin, neither blonde nor brunette but somewhere in-between, fall between my fingers and then slide away. My palms tingle. You are wearing a bracelet of small bells and I catch my breath.
Raised within the safety of convention and tradition and denomination and culture. It is easier to live and wake without the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The snake's strange whispering is rarely black and white, good and evil, but rather mixed messages like, “I knew this would be a trial for you.” and “We've always known.” The snake murmurs dissent and false discovery. But in the end, he knows nothing and no one. He is not Christ. When we reach past the snake, not to pluck the fruit, but to pull ourselves into the Godtree, it is then that we understand. We need not eat for Christ is our fruit.
The lights are blue. They arrived in my inbox via PhotoBucket and were accompanied by snow and machines and gentle things that make a young woman a woman like armor-clad fairies hanging among solar system models and family portraits of smiling parents. The blue lights hang in slender strands from the ceiling which is only six feet at its highest point and three feet at its lowest. They glow with an aura both warm and cool, suspended somewhere between temperatures when sensation wipes away the need for yes or no, day or night, hot or cold. The portal to my blue room is in my wallet. My wallet is tucked into the outside pocket of my soft, loose leather pants. A chain, silver with charms (a key, a lock, a motorcycle, a heart, a dove), snakes up out of the deep pocket and latches onto the belt loop on my right hip. The chain and charms make urban jiggle bells. I like the sound mixed with your bracelet brass.
We are raised with what works for our parents for we are part of their world. We are not yet making our own world. The reality we see, no matter how much we accept and embrace it, is their reality. It is not our own. If we attend public school we start to glimpse foreshadowing of our own reality, we start to witness the overlapping realities of others. But still, we belong to the path of our parents. When finally we come through the fabric of their universe and cross over into our own (sometimes violently, sometimes without barely noticing) it can be easy or hard but it is always intrinsically different. Even if the surface and patterns are the same, at the core, our reality is different. This is because we are not our parents. It is only when we stop craving their approval, dreading their disappointment, and living for their eyes, that our reality will at long last be revealed.
I turn to face you. I tip my head back to look in your eyes. Your features are bird-like, chiseled, elegant. Your eyes are brown, gold and green. Just beneath my focused vision I make out a small cross hanging between your collar bones. It is gold. Two more of the tiny brass bells hang on either side it. I don't look down directly. Your shirt is unbuttoned three of six. You wear nothing under it. The music pulses now in time with the lights in time with my body in time with the chorus of miniature brass bells. You are wearing jet black CK jeans. I decide you are a herald of the End Times... one of the riders perhaps... and I wonder where you left your horse.
Of course, when everything is suspect we doubt even ourselves and what our own senses tell us. The comfortable certainty that comes from living in someone else's reality is like hard candy or chocolate – sweet and soothing and addictive. Nice when someone else carries the burdens. Nice when someone else makes the rules and takes the blame and builds the truth. Safer that way. But one reality does not fit all. Reality is not wash and wear. It is customized and tailored and fit to our bodies and our hearts and our souls in a way that will feel so right and so perfect – like armor and evening gown/tux with tails all in one – that we'll realize we're knowing and feeling and living for the first time, for never before were we fully alive.
I am aware in these moments lost in music that everything about my reality falls away except for passion. Desire is my companion when I dance. She stomps, rocks, sways, slides, rolls her way between lights and strobes and backbeat rhythms until she fills my body. She is light and heat and clarity of thought and balance of action. She is ache and burning, taut and pulsing, muscle, bone, heartbeat. She carries over. She fuels me. She never leaves me. She is my celebration of being alive.
Christ carries over. Christ moves with us between realities. Not Christ as we are told He is, but the voice of Christ that speaks, privately, to each of us. The whispers of divinity. This is the only truth. Rules, dictates, man's guidelines... these alter and adapt between realities. Even morals can change. Even your favorite food, color, pass-time. But that internal voice of Christ – that voice from outside yourself that lights that place in your heart... that voice from within yourself that sends a beacon into the heavens with every prayer – will remain your own. Once you discover Him, you can never leave Him behind.
I am straddling my Kawa in the parking lot. I am looking at the photo again, illuminated by the single distant street lamp... illuminated by the aura of small blue lights. An engine kick starts. I want to fall into that portal of blue and wake up looking up at those strands of stars. I look up. You ride a black and white steel stallion that makes my T1000 look like a sleek toy. I watch you pull out of the parking lot. Your hair streams like a short cloak beneath your helmet. I look up. The sky is black. It is scattered with thirteen million stars. I was taught the names of the constellations.
Tonight I rename all of them.
EJ
