Skywards

I’m standing in the middle of the bridge. Beneath me, the river. It roars, announcing its presence, its power, its inexhaustible and unending flux. The sky above me is a great slab of slate.

Not slate. Slate has presence. The sky makes itself known in its absence. It is void, vacuum, the howling expanse that envelopes all the world. Pitiless. Blind.

I am suspended over one river and yet immersed in another, an interminable flow of people streaming over the bridge. I stand in the midst of it all, and this human river cleaves about me as if I were a stone splitting the water. I cannot move so the world moves around me.

There is a strong and steady wind, which seems to come from all sides at once. Both ahead of me and behind me there are the towers of the city, reaching ever skyward, straining to blaspheme against the essential nullity of the above with their actuality. The above and the below, incomparable, unalike, having only intransigence in common.

As the towers rush up to fill the sky, the sky reaches down and surrounds them with nothingness. Every ingress the below makes into the above is returned with simultaneous attack and retreat, the actual eternally surrounded by the null.

That is when the sky finally fell. It exploded downward, quicker than anything, with all the implacable urgency of time itself, screaming all the way. The world beneath my feet retreated from it in desperation, had already retreated, had begun its retreat as soon as the sky had begun its assault.

And it was then that I realised the impossible. With a single inner motion, the inconceivable was conceived. I was not falling downward with the world, the world remained where it always had. It was I that fell upwards.

And as I fell, I felt my presence dissolving, the actuality of my being converting into nullity, thing into no-thing, and after my initial fear subsided, I welcomed this as an infant would welcome a return to the womb.