A Liturgy - 5 The Convergence

The Convergence The contact was not a collision. It was a seepage. Where the mist of my breath met your silhouette, the shadow absorbed the frost. The silver lines of the web, still anchored to my bare soles, began to draw the dark upward— pulling the unyielding mass of the trunk-filled void straight into my veins. A cold, heavy mercury climbing through my ankles, bypassing the bone, settling into the marrow. The two pillars resting on the same foundation began to blur at the margins. I could no longer tell whether the cold air displacement was pressing against my face, or my face was expanding outward into the stillness. Around us the frozen trunks rooted deeper, their towering shadows growing wider, more translucent, until the vertical lines ceased to separate the space. The forest did not contain the void; it became the texture of it. Your weight leaned into the fraction of an inch that separated us, immense even as it thinned. My chest, which had finally found its rhythm in the deep, stopped expanding. There was no longer a necessity to draw air from the outside; the scent of pine needles became my throat— a cool, quiet corridor hosting the absolute centre of the dark. Panic would have found nothing to hold. The need to belong to a single, separate shape had thinned out. We were becoming the stillness that allowed the current to move. Then the warmth beneath the wood rose, a deep resonance that struck the soles of my feet, and the frost on the silver lines synchronized— vibrating with a silent, icy white frequency that illuminated the infinite depth of the dark. The vertical stillness gave way to a tilt, a slow, monumental turning of the entire axis. The solid wood beneath my feet loosened its grip. We began to slide, locked together in a tight, seamless equilibrium, along the smooth, open face of a completely weightless dark.