Flood of thought, sunrise, sunset…Sitting in that place of beauty and edge and impossibility. That was the place that I had so yearned for…That was the place that embodies everything that I’d felt since the loss of. Of. Dark skies in the daytime: impending storm, impending downfall, impending torrent. Sleeves pulled up around tanned but not burned arms, left still exhibiting the eleven lines that had so defined the last five years of my life, eleven lines of scar tissue now barely discernible from the surrounding scarred tissue, except for the fact that the lines were a lighter shade of tanned. Barefoot, toes buried in the sand, absorbing warmth and grounding me in that world, as the fingertips of Sakyamuni called the earth to witness not his divinity but his enlightenment. Hand outstretched, fingertips touching the earth as the armies of Devadatta raged around him, hand outstretched to call the earth, all of existence, to be witness to his enlightenment. Toes dug into the sand as seagulls raged around me, wind blew through seabreeze-knotted hair, not brushed since November, sky above growing darker in defiance of any human definition of Spring Break.

i contain multitudes.

Moments of lucidity: the screams of the interior fell silent as the rage of the exterior filled me. Struggle for peace; struggle for silence. I’d gone to the edge of the world to do what every good metaphorical struggling author does: find himself. I sat before the kingdom and the power and the glory; I looked into the face of the closest thing I’d seen to god. I sat until the doubt and the rage and the mourning were replaced. I sat until I was filled up again. Beauty. Sitting before that amorphous canvas and watching the power of existence paint itself in waterspouts illuminated from behind by divine lightning. There was such a peace in submission to that divinity…Take me, destroy me, tear me apart so that I won’t have to return to the places I fear.