Emptiness is the eucharist
I walked through the long wood, and it was as though I had never had a body. My feet did not press the earth, my hands did not belong to me. The trees rose like cathedral pillars, their limbs entwined overhead, filtering the light into a dead and holy dusk. Space stretched endlessly between them, hallways without doors, corridors without end. I could have walked forever. I could have stayed. There was no hunger there, no thirst, no shame.
And then the trees split open, their roots unthreading, and I was cast out. The ground turned to stone beneath me brittle, pale, unstirred by wind or sun. There were others here. I saw them from afar, wandering, open-mouthed, with fingers shoved into their throats as though they could wring water from their own tongues. I clenched my hands, but they burned, skin drawn tight as though trying to peel itself away from my bones. I had never noticed them in the wood. There, I had been faceless. Here, I had returned to myself, and I felt the weight of my own presence like an iron yoke.
Somewhere behind the mist, a bell rang. Not for me. But I heard it, deep in the hollows of my ribs, rattling like a voice caught in a well. God had curled Himself into the space between the sound and the silence, and I felt Him move. The others did not stop, did not look. Their feet dragged forward, toward something I could not see. I followed.
And then, rising from the rock, I saw it. A dome, pale as a bleached skull, cut against the horizon. I saw it with my own eyes. It peered back at me, eyeless, its surface smooth but for the faint blemishes of time. Steps fanned outward like ribs laid bare, drawing me in. And oh, the hunger in my throat, the ache in my hands. It was mine. All mine. They could follow me to its mouth, but none could enter with me.
I cannot tell you what happened next. It would change nothing. Would you understand, if I told you I had emptied myself of need? If my mouth had opened and my hunger had been filled with light? If I had seen it not with my eyes, but with something deeper, something raw and unnameable? If it had seen me, too? If it had known me? If it had answered me in a voice like breaking glass:
"How could you not?"
What difference would it make, for you to know? The world still spat me out. I awoke whole, though I should not have been. A body, still a body. Hands, still hands. My own foolish flesh, begging to be unmade, curling in on itself, tight and fevered. I could not hold it in. The knowing, the hunger, the grief. I tried. I tried. But my limbs tore themselves apart, and I fell, and I crawled back, and I will crawl back again.
I am. I am. I am.
But I will not tell you the details. You already know them. You all do