Apotheosis

Too often in this life I yearn for the moment when I shed this coil and free myself from the trappings of our "real world." I hunger for the separation, to spin off amongst the stars and soar through the substance of heaven. My body is my own, my flesh, my blood, but on days like today it feels like a thick, ugly skin, a shell, like I'm wearing several extra layers of clothes. A big bag of flesh that is stuck to my wayward spirit, clinging to it for life yet dragging it down to terrestrial prisons. Is it wrong for me to disassociate with my flesh? What other sense experience do I know? But if I know nothing else, how can my body feel cumbersome and heavy, weighty and anchoring, entrapping. How can I yearn for a lifting, a floating of the mind a drifting upward that I've never experienced? I close my eyes and the desire takes, I can see it I can feel it, my every sense pulling me up and out, all that is me going out and away and up, ever up. I tingle through the atmosphere, feeling the bubble of molecules on skin that isn't there. The rush and the cold bite at my eyes, but there is no cheek to stream down and my tears fall to the waiting earth. I blaze through the empty spaces of our universe, I huddle close to the stars for warmth, I touch eternity with bodiless fingers. Sense and time are gone. I am gone. I breathe in infinity, and it warms me like a fire as I burn from the inside out. I fuse feeling with thought, desire with effort, pain with love all atoms bouncing in my brain now fused. They burn within me, so I burn without. Brighter than the light of creation the light reaches out like the hands of my father to guide and comfort, to warm and pray. I take the universe in my heart, and I bathe it in the glow, the warmth of my being, the gentle light of my desire for peace.

Then I open my eyes, and it's still just a computer screen. The stars are hidden from me. The vastness of the universe laughs at my fragility. The echoes of eternity pass through my ears, but I cannot hear, or touch, or taste. They are beyond me. It is all beyond me. I am still here.

Still here.