Love and death.
The night air has a faint metallic tang, whether odor or taste I cannot discern, of blood and foetid soil. I feel a light prickle on my exposed skin, like colliding with a spider's web, but it is only a light rain, perhaps the source of that unusual pungency. Looking up, the sky is heavy with clouds the mottled purples, greys and sour reds of putrefaction, cleft here and there to reveal the deep blue emptiness of space. No moonlight or starlight makes it through those pregnant, rotting clouds, only glimpses of nothing. Lowering my eyes to scan the street is no more lovely, sodium lamps taint the dry grass, houses and varied human artifacts with a sickly orange gloom, in which silence conspires with sight to make the world seem dead, abandoned. The trees that frame both street and sky are black and still, sentinels guarding the boundaries of this strange deep night. I am motionless for seconds, then minutes, as my senses take in as much information as they can, ancient reptilian brain stem sifting it for sign of threats or or prey. In the disconcertingly foreign environment of my own street, I suddenly fill with vitality, each of my senses alive and aroused. I can feel my heart beating, pumping blood through my veins, can feel the pulse even in the tiny capillaries in my eyes. Minute changes in neurochemistry send my mind spinning off in an unexpected direction, to the desire for a lover with whom to share this intensity of sensation, and a new kind of arousal begins to build. The flavor of the air seems less like blood now, transubstantiated to the sharpness of sex and sweat, rooting me to the spot.
Turing back toward the sky, a strange new thought fills my consciousness: how would I share this with the lover I desire, who cannot perceive such subtle colors? How would I explain that this terrible sky is not repulsive, but mysterious and awe-inspiring? That the very hues that make this landscape appear forsaken also lend it an eerie beauty? Would his own senses, already more acute than my own, undergo that same quickening, and find such pleasure as I have in this attunement? Death and violence are gone from me, as are thoughts of sex, and what remains is the overwhelming desire to delve into the mind of another, to know how they experience the world around them, as well as the universe within. I wonder if, underneath the trappings, that is the essence of love, the desire to delve beyond commonalities into the vast and utterly alien terrain that lies within the mind of another. It is such a profoundly stimulating idea, I find myself at a loss for words.
Most people do not seem to think like this. Perhaps it is why so many people seem to find me unsettling.
Turing back toward the sky, a strange new thought fills my consciousness: how would I share this with the lover I desire, who cannot perceive such subtle colors? How would I explain that this terrible sky is not repulsive, but mysterious and awe-inspiring? That the very hues that make this landscape appear forsaken also lend it an eerie beauty? Would his own senses, already more acute than my own, undergo that same quickening, and find such pleasure as I have in this attunement? Death and violence are gone from me, as are thoughts of sex, and what remains is the overwhelming desire to delve into the mind of another, to know how they experience the world around them, as well as the universe within. I wonder if, underneath the trappings, that is the essence of love, the desire to delve beyond commonalities into the vast and utterly alien terrain that lies within the mind of another. It is such a profoundly stimulating idea, I find myself at a loss for words.
Most people do not seem to think like this. Perhaps it is why so many people seem to find me unsettling.