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.
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