My ears and my eyes were old, haggard things; the spans of ages. “Fly, fly,” said the harlequin. But I fell from splendor in the mind of god. My stomach was born for the house of cross purposes, eating every stone that bore a hint of gold, peristalting and panning with enzymes to sift that malleable and conductive stuff from dull and jagged rocks. And yet – even with the sediment that sluiced through my veins, spurting even across the brain’s ventricles, through all the days that stones rolled and scraped across gyri and sulci, numbing all lusts – I could still form a dream of you.

Lord of the castle, deliver me to Zoom’s waiting room with you beyond the door. I remember the day I met you.

I’d gone out under the sun to view the slow ripples of Lake Carmel. I bathed there past the pebbles. I doggy-paddled. I dunked my head under and screamed out through bubbles as fish darted apart. I rested. I saw, too, what I thought to be an artifact of the eye, a glare maybe, a strange refraction of the light upon water, but no, I saw the faces of the dead – aviators all, wearing uniforms and captains’ hats – come noiselessly from the house of god to gleam upon mortal waters and bathe in the beam of the day star.

“What complex refreshment we find here. Oh the liquid ripples of earth. Kaleidoscopes of sensation in each instant – so distinct from the ideal joy of heaven and emptiness. It overwhelms the spirit.”

“It overwhelms,” I called out, and their jaws dropped, for as many times as I’d gazed upon the lake, my eyes had never before caught their fleeting light.

“Who are you, cousin?” they asked. “What would you write on the bottom of a nametag?”

I read the nametag over my heart. “I’m the bright autumn leaves caught in a swirl between two school walls. I am a landscape dotted with hills, houses, and streams – I am the the tavern and the town drunk stumbling out, and also I am the whole of it. I am every promise I’ve failed to keep. I am that which dances slowly, a beckoning. On good days, I am the infinity from which creation springs. On bad days, I’m that guy who ate too many rocks. I started a company once.”

“Hm,” they said. “Good enough. We’ll give you a ride.”

I didn’t need to ask where. Their plane took me across oceans and cities and then upward to where the blue sky gave way to void. We flew far beyond earth, past Jupiter and beyond, beyond any place I could claim to know, until soon we came to a great house made of nothing.

It was god’s all-night rager, in a place that never dawned. Luminous beings tramped the floor – the lesser gods and goddesses of other worlds. They raved and sang and burped, and their laughter sent tingles through the bones of my fingers.

I went to enter and found the hand of a hippo-headed god on my shoulder. “This house party is for gods. Are you a god?”

My eyes angled up at the god, widening while my stomach dropped. I am not a god, I thought. I am only a guy who has spent most of his days behind the soft glow of a laptop screen. I am but a bag of meat covered with skin and, often, psoriasis. It was not my place to feast with gods. A cold numbness spread through my body while the luminous beings chuckled and slapped each other’s backs.

“Bro,” said one with the face of a crocadile. I followed his arm, which ended at a finger pointing toward my chest. “Have you forgotten so soon what you learned in Lake Carmel? Look at the words over your heart.”

I looked and I saw, and facing the god said, “I know you. I have seen you day in and out. You are the wildfire that burns away half-truths. You are change, the precipice we fear, the un-namer, fungal eater of that which rots, the joyous falling of the earth around the sun, he who exposes the illusion of dusks and dawns, reshuffler of atoms.”

“Who am I?” called another and another and another and another.

Then I named them one by one. “You are small dwellers in night, the sound of crickets, the glow of fireflies. You are hynogogia, those whisps which lie between waking and sleeping, textures too subtle to title, the ineffable. You are the burning embers that fall from fireworks, drifting slowly through the air around us to reach the ground. You are the challenger, the one who asks, “When last did you allow your soul to drift up to the surface of your skin?’ You are the presence of love in each thought. You, sir, are the swish of grass on the passing boot and the crunching of dry tinder underneath. You are exhuberant violence, the thrill of near-death, the respect that follows. And you, lady, you are the cat stretching all four of its legs in the warmth of daylight, to then roll into the grass and watch the work of ants. And you––“

But as I turned and saw you, I knew not what to say. I had never seen someone like you. Astonishing was the only word that came to mind, so I searched for fancier ones. “You! You are… You are the knowing glance, the light that passes between mirrors, the sudden plumment into now.”

“No I’m not,” you said.

“No? Hm. How about…yes! You are the murmuration of starlings! The veins in lamina, the stem, the source!”