Finally we are awake.
We swam up to an invisible shore, ghost gulls calling out in faint and echoing caws. My love and I, we stand in the fragile dawn light. She is covered in diamonds and dressed in fronds of seagrass. Above, a blue sun, dazzling and iridescent through the hazy cobalt atmosphere. It hangs like an electric eye in the fractal sky, casting its lonely gaze on us like some spacebound sentry. She takes my hand, and I tremble with the weight of the gesture. In her embrace, I feel a spark of the divine, and only in the infinity of that shared universe does the notion of religion make any sense to me. Her hands are small and warm, she pulls me toward her. The look she gives me is a hundred thousand oceans. She turns me into the sun, and all barriers fall away. From far off, drums sound. Miles inland, glass mountains rise into the upper atmosphere. They flicker and dance with a red and yellow light, great fires are burning on their far side. The drums grow louder, and louder still, rumbling and shaking the sun from its perch. The drums stop suddenly, and the sun slides down that electric paisley sky until it hits the water, making no noise and almost no splash. A single drop rises up from the center of a watery corona, and rises higher and higher and stops. It becomes the moon. The day is so short here. My love and I face each other, wrap each other in our gaze. Finally we are awake.