A Liturgy - 8 The Loom

The Loom The luminous floor far below was not a map of distances. It was a map of currents. As we drifted over the edge of the aperture, the millions of silver lines pulsed with a slow, arterial warmth, tracing infinite webs that broke apart and rewove themselves in the quiet. Looking down, I felt the phantom ache of the surface return as a faint, distant hum, like the sound of a far-off hive. No faces in it. No sterile rooms. Only the weave. Every text I had ever memorized, every performance I had given to stay anchored above, was down there— reduced to a single, trembling thread in the vast weave. Small. Unlost. Still held. You kept your attention on me, leaning your weight into my side, your density thinning until the cold mercury in my marrow flowed outward, crossing the boundary of my skin to run along the contours of your shadow. We were no longer just coinciding. We were spilling into the same network. The witnessing attention held the lens open, and the gravity of the silver paths rose up to meet us. The scent of pine needles, which had been a cool corridor in my throat, expanded into the scent of the entire expanse— a sharp, resinous frost that smelled of beginnings and collapses, of earth that had never been touched and cities long thinned into dust. I looked at the infinite paths and did not ask which one belonged to me; the desire to separate my own breath from the dark ocean had dissolved, and a profound, heavy joy settled into the compression around my body— the absolute acceptance of the fall, the love of the current that carried us, regardless of where it broke. The silver floor was rushing upward now, or we were plunging downward into its fibres— to be woven back into the single, infinite fabric that had been dreaming us all along.