Eurhythmy - Part I - Chaos.

Immaculate

The fragments beneath my feet

Seven years’ bad luck

Cutting into my

Souls

A split personality

Glimpsed

In a perfect disharmony of shards

Mirrored fragments of myself

My face beneath my toes

Head under heels.

Boring clichéd self-destruction...

-Alexisonfire, ‘Polaroids of Polar Bears’

Set in stone the sun will come…

To me it looks so pretty burning

                        -The Used, ‘Take It Away’

Safe and calm, alone on this hidden patch of sand. I sit watching the waves curl beneath a darkening sky. In this little recess, you never sit and face the three rough stone walls that enclose you – you are brought to seek out the open side; the infinite, hopeful view that stretches beyond the breakers, beyond the space and time that hems us all in.

The tide is low. Volcanoes where sea worms are hiding themselves under the sand pop and spit water as the creatures breathe. Black sea snail shells on my rock appear abandoned, but you can tell there is still life inside by the way they cling to its surface. Despite distant rounds of thunder the sea remains relatively still – a millpond disturbed by a skipping stone. Without a breeze the scent of salt and surf hangs heavy, and when I inhale I can taste the salt at the back of my throat. I love the seclusion of this place – so did Mum.

Calls of children on the main stretch of beach diminish as the sky turns deep-sea blue, indistinguishable from the ocean but for its clouds. I check my watch – a gift from Dad – but choose to ignore the time. More clouds gather as the sun sinks into the horizon, adding its orange to the blue of the melding water and sky. Tinges of crimson span the ocean, rippling on the surface like intangible ribbons of spider silk. I imagine that same glow flashing on the dry, grassy dunes, where Mum and I used to ride our horses years ago. But the eroded walls of rock surrounding me shut out everything else. There is only me, and something else. Something.

I dig my toes into the sand and begin to write.

*   *   *

I’m not sure what’s worse

The waiting or the waiting room

-Alexisonfire, ‘Accidents’

What is the bringer of this chaos? Is it the desire for family? For love? For understanding and truth? Or is it that great empty space that is a part of everyone – that divine infinite which gave soul and memory and dreams to a beast and called him man, and which, in doing so, brought misery and limitless wonder into the world… I can only stand on the brink of that invisible infinite and shudder, and wait. And question. And remember.

An abyss threatens below. No light glints off the sheer walls. There is only an inky black there, ebbing and flowing and waiting. This vacuum even seems to absorb sound, air, life. Reaching deep into the bowels of existence and all knowledge that has ever lain dormant; this is the abyss that I look into, eyes never adjusting to the endless deep dark, but still aching to see what is – or may not be – there.

Trying not to lose balance on this precipice, I cannot help but be drawn into its depths. A sudden sound behind me – I spin and lose balance. I fall backwards into the pit.

It seems like I hang forever, motionless though I am falling. Hopeless that I have been lost to the abyss, I slacken, believing that to fight against this endless periphery of human experience, thought, and death, is too awesome a task for me. Relaxing all my limbs in the knowledge of my inevitable end, I realise something is holding me back. Something has caught my right arm.

Something pulls me back from that inky black. Over the top of the ledge, and I know I am not ended; there is still time! …Time for what, exactly? Time to watch more TV? Time to watch my father drink himself to death? Time for useless contemplation, soul-searching? It seemed that the only real thing left to live for was that universal truth – nothing. I sit confused, not understanding why I am still in the world, and not melting into the inky blackness I had found so terrible. It now seemed like a welcome place, where all my answers would be found and there would be no more death, pain, family, niggling stresses. Everything would dissolve into that oblivion, leaving no trace that once a girl had been there, a girl who thought and dreamed, who had fallen to darkness.

Something was still standing beside me, barely shaken by the effort taken to halt my eternal fall. It looked at me, contemplating not my tired eyes or the sex-hair lying in a tangled orgy on my head, or the sunken posture of a girl who had come so close to becoming nothing. Its touching gaze drew up my eyes from the ground. I cannot tell you what I saw then, only that in seeing Something I saw Nothing. I remember a presence but no visual entity. Something was just there.

How had I come to look into this abyss? I could not see anything there, only the all-pervading blackness that equates to nothingness. Emptiness. But strangely, I couldn’t stop looking, delving into the black beneath my feet. There was nothing to see… so why couldn’t I draw myself away? There was something waiting for me in that abyss.

Did you truly perceive nothing?

Yes.

Then you have discovered everything!

But -