This short story can be found on Lyrical Lip Service, but found it appropriate for the launch of Swimming The Void. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you enjoy. If you have, well, it's kinda like sprinkles, better if scattered about... Infinite Love, Tami Sue Snow (aka Elyan Grey)
My days and nights had begun to bleed together, like water colors too wet to grip the canvas. The perfect sunrise would peek its eager face over the horizon, just as I was folding myself into the embrace of the nebulous velvet night. Something within my being would not allow for daylight to be slighted my presence.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” was my dismissal toward lack of slumber. I could not permit a day to slip by, would not abide the subtle darkening beneath my eyes.
The truest depth of my soul knew one thing: I was different, strange, and peculiar. Not that I was unable to mesh, in perfect precision, with those around me. This joy I embarked on with simple ease. It was the inner self that struggled with normalcy, seeking out precarious and serpentine encounters that, like thinly laced ice on a frosted river, could potentially shatter and carry me wantonly into vacuous ends.
Overall, what I felt most often was empty. Even when filled with soul shattering music, and consumed by the sweet kisses of lovers. The thrills I sought were a means of filling a vast void, immeasurable by human standards. People like me didn’t last long on the earth. Their lives were cut short, most often by their own doing. But suicidal, I was not. Life— the living, the breathing in, the blanketing myself within every experience, the physical, as well as the emotional stimulation, was what made up my existence, was my heaven, was my reason.
The night was dark, absent of the moons radiance, on that particular evening, the one that, in all its glory, changed my life forever. The one that would present me with a gift of understanding, expanding my mind, my soul in a way that I could never retract, would never fathom the notion.
Lady Pacific baptized my naked feet with her foamy exhale as I made my way up the beach, exploring her midnight shore. Scrunching my toes into the satin sand of her skin, I pondered my aloneness. Her hushed gasp lifted my hair, scattering it like delicate tickling of feathers upon my cheeks, my neck, my exposed back. It was in those moments I felt most alive, at one with the orb of life I happened upon. But this was not a new experience for me. Many nights of my recent existence had been spent exploring these shores, enveloping my isolation.
And yet this night was so very different.
On a private beach, familiar to me as I had cast my loneliness upon this waterfront many times, I spread my body out upon the raw powder of the ocean’s edge. I cradled my head into its suppleness. My gaze lingered on the haphazard shapes of the constellations: Gemini, Scorpio, Libra—their intensity a familiar sentinel, my focus, centering me in the moment.
For how long I sought the Gods in the stars, I know not. But with the gentle sweeping of the tide upon the shore, I became lulled, lucid of mind, of being.
My sight thickened with each languid brushing of the waves upon the sand. The stars above me blurred, becoming soft streaks of light. And then I swear that I was dreaming…
…if only I wouldn’t have felt his hand gathering mine into his. I might have believed it an illusion, a conjuring of my willful mind.
“Come away with me,” he whispered. His voice was like the tenderest of love songs, sweeping into the depths of my soul, stirring the very essence of my being.
Within this dreamatic fascination, there was not a moment of hesitation. For in the next instant, I was carried away by him, upward and into the cosmic cloth of the universe.
In my purest form of energy, I did not have need for breath. Freed from the confines of my flesh bound prison. “Where are you taking me?” My thoughts became his thoughts. And his became mine. Communication amongst ethereal beings needs no voice, unfettered, it flows with scintillating ease.
“I want to show you all that is, and will ever be.”
So pure was this companionship, so true, so real in vibration, I felt the hum of his energy in perfect resonation with my own. If ever I could grasp the understanding of soul mate, it was in that moment. This boy of energetic chance belonged with me, passing through me, winding around me, dancing and combining his energy with mine. This moment belonged to me, a forever thing, tangible, like the lilt of symphonic strings reverberating through the elements.
He pulled me along, into and through the web of cosmogonic energy, shaking my core at its very foundation. My soul trembled, knowing that I was a part of it, connected and passing through and along its threads. When we halted, hovering within a sweeping cloud of stardust, I looked upon him, seeing his soul for the first time.
He appeared a boy in form, a radiant angel of energy, violet in hue and abundantly beautiful. His face had some semblance of human features, which was relative to my own perceptions.
With slow precision I moved my hand to his cheek, grazing its edge with my lighted fingers. Like a delicate ripple upon a sunlit pool, his energy fluxed bowing and swaying in response. Transfixed, I marveled at the atomic vitality of him.
When he reached out to me, I followed the movement of his atmospheric limb. My being, like a form of swirling dust motes, sparkling and stable, at his feathery touch were caused to dance, turning lithely fluid, catching the light. I sighed, an elegant shudder of my soul.
I pondered how I could see these things without eyes, feel them without skin and trap these memories within, with no mind to hold them. The answer came to me like a whisper soft breath brushing the downy hairs on my neck. Experiences, like all things, harbor energy, collecting in our collective conscience.
For awhile, we travelled, hand in hand, slithering through the finely spun web of energy, sanguine and dazzling, eternal and infinite. The evanescent twinkle of the adventure, too soon, elapsed into the breaking of dawn. Once again, I found myself enticed into the confines of humanity. But forever I would grip this knowledge, holding it to my heart with both hands.
Meeting Chance, I would eternally be changed. Drawing those whose energies hum and resonate with mine, never would I fall prey to emptiness again.
