I realize that I am in a desert.
I was not aware of this before,
and I am not in my dreaming or sleep, let there be no reference,
I am in a desert in this very moment.
I see through the middle of my brows, and I lead from a small area underneath my navel. The desert is flat and empty, at times beautiful but in a way that is familiar. I am surprised by all of this, especially the fact that I found myself in this desert and by my not knowing how I got here makes me wonder where I came from. Then I catch a shimmer of light and I’m underwater again, not screaming but I have a knot under my stomach that feels gripped with fright and ecstasy, and I feel it like needles dancing and flames licking ice. I find myself in the desert, dry. All morning I wandered the desert and would find myself, again, suddenly, in the World underwater, every time I watched the dance and shimmer of light. I always caught sight of it as if by accident, always in the peripheral view of my right eye, and when I looked for it, it was no where to be found.
I realized, if I unfocused my eyes and broadened my temples while looking at the deserts horizon, I was able to watch the Dance, and the light shimmered with intensity and grew with each twirl and turn until their motions made the pull and release of the moontides, and I saw very clearly a body of water dancing in waves of light in the middle of the desert.
I recognized its distinct bleu water as the same that surrounded my screams the week since the full moon, holding me in their blue embrace, my mouth open, wild, my sounds being eaten by fish or perhaps they were collected by the Blue in clear bubbles, to slowly rise from my depths to the surface. I felt so far down I wondered if they would take years to reach the clear layer of the surface, only to burst upon contact, and if it was then that they released my sounds, in their first and last breath, or if the journey itself silenced them.
I watched this mirage with certainty of my existence in it, I rolled in its waves in all the days after the full moon. I realized exactly where I’d been before this desert, and that blue waters live in desert air.
Part of a novel in the works, Mirage is a thread in the loom of progress.
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