What about the true soul?

“Who ever got it in their heads that we have to die?” Rani had asked.

For a moment, I thought that I wouldn't know her, and she wouldn't know me, after this night. The pure joy of love burned up in the fire. Was that possible? I shivered, and stumbled to one knee. The universe and its infinite pathways... I remembered that you could follow one track and end up in a different reality from the friend you started with, with a different friend, or a variant of that person, or a variant of you (sure, all of them you, but what about the true soul, on which path did it go?).   It frightened me deeply, and I didn't know how to voice it.

The next day the sun seemed overly bright and I put sunglasses on, hiking up to her small nook and tent beneath the cedar trees.

"Rani," I said quietly.

 A shift from within the tent, and she sat up and unzipped the door. I crouched, as she half-squinted and stretched the sleep fuzziness away.

"I'm leaving," I said.

She looked at me, not saying anything, and then smiled and reached and tugged the sunglasses off of my eyes. She laughed, and grew quiet. Her brown eyes kept contact with mine, unwavering. I didn't say anything either, grateful she'd reminded me to trust, astonished and amazed by her action of revealing me to myself.

"I'll see you," she said, and hugged me. Once more we looked at each other before I inched away from her tent and stood.

"Love you," she said, through the tent fabric.

"I love you, too," and I left, hurrying to catch up with Roy, who I knew needed to get home.

On the ride with Roy, he took the curves too fast, making me cringe near each deep ditch that fell down the side of the mountain.  He needed the edginess, I knew.  He was afraid not to feel.  I pondered Rani’s thoughts about fear and love, love being the purest thing in the universe, fear its mirror.  Fear is kept in the stomach, where it burns as fire that rises into the heart, where there is love. When love consumes the flame, one is made whole, fear absent.

She'd taken the dark glasses from eyes.  My belly still churned, tight, uneasy with the thought that we've got a soul sometimes, but no one has one non-stop, for keeps.  Or do we?  If I could trust what was in her eyes, maybe I could.

she is a holy grail

The amber burn of tequila. I roll it along my tongue, holding the sensation, wanting it to burn away the naked fear that is creeping up inside me. I’m sitting on my porch, hearing the rich open frog chirps and insect noise in the trees that stretch out from the railing, me almost at their height as the ridge drops away behind my apartment. It’s dark out there, no moon tonight, the sky half-cloudy and obscuring the stars.

Another sip of the agave medicine, and I wrinkle my face from the sting. In the dark to the left off my porch is the dead dog I found on the road today, its body limp and forgotten. After stopping my car, I’d pulled on its back haunches, tugged the animal to my car, and loaded it into the trunk. The body was stiff, the dog about 40 pounds, and once home I found rocks and wood and buried it, not so some other creature wouldn’t find it, say a vulture, or something to continue the life cycle, but more so its blank face wasn’t there, open to the sky, wasn’t still looking out. I’d covered it, and now, with the third sip of tequila, I felt I’d done wrong.

Death had to have meaning, but it didn’t mean it lacked meaning if I didn’t understand it. But I wondered: what if the dog didn’t understand its own death? Did I take away any possibility of understanding by covering it up? How far into death does one need to look, so that slinky tingling feel of fear wouldn’t rise?

I raised the tequila bottle, held it high before my face. A faint glimmer of light reflected in the liquid. Light. Another thing I didn’t understand. Why joy and beauty came and went. About how to trust those things, the light parts of life. How not to want them too much.

I walked into my apartment with the tequila, set it on top of the fridge. Then back outside to rest my legs on the wood stool there. I leaned back, tugged my hat down over my eyes. It was a long time, and the fear rose more than once, but finally I was able to sleep.

What is the question to which my life is the answer?

The trial of the sexual dream: can you climb to your feet on that wave and surf into beauty?

It's easy to fall off the board into the crash of surf, the sensation of churned silica, and forget, forget the pure joy.

If I don't say this thought right, I might destroy it

Standing on the roof as the sun set, we tiptoed between the shards of broken glass. 

I pulled the bone out from the box.  It was the same size as a finger bone, maybe the piece between the knuckle and the tip.  Super white.  Like stone, hard, yet different, organic and temporary.  This had belonged to some human.  Somebody like me.

When fear rises up in your belly, you need to wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra. You need to jump upon it, crash it down, hold it, hold it tight to yourself and know it and love it and let it go and don’t ever let it fucking hold you back again. Cause you’re fucking God, seriously. You’re fucking God.

"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything." -- Henry Miller

From light and dark birth color

Colors arise at the borders, where the light and the dark flow together.

Rani sits legs crossed and facing me, and we talk without words, singing rhythms in silence to each other that become color in our minds, blues, vivid greens, shades of sunrise, and a dab of red. We play this game of peering eyes to eyes for at least an hour, maybe forever.

A pure silver with reflections of a hue we have promised never to define weaves into my eyes and its light refracts across the realness of her. I blink. A smile lifts across her.

"I almost lost you because I thought I had to believe in you,” I say, hugging her.

"Sometimes your soul needs to make mistakes,” she says.