Om Green
I am alone.
Inside a vast and endless light.
There is nothing for my eyes to settle on or gain perspective from, they burn and ache against this dimensionless reality. My body is suspended but not floating. I am not weightless or moving. I am a foreign object, a splinter, defiling this perfect space. I can tell by its infinite grace, that I do not belong here.
She is in front of me.
A speck in the nothing, years away, instantaneously, a giant on her hands and knees towering over me.
The whites of her eyes as they bulge in their sockets starkly contrasting against her midnight black skin. Her mouth contorts and her red lips curl back, bearing her strong white teeth.
She is fighting for her life.
My heart is stricken with raw grief, and I weep.
The loneliness suffocates me.
I watch her skin stretch and contract around her heavy belly which violently thrashes as it hangs under her. I can make out the head, the elbows, the knees, the toes of the large life she contains. She screams, but no sounds emerge
I move around her, and begin to see she is not in a moment of birth, but that she herself is perpetual creation.
All of life converging deep inside of her..
My breath burns my throat and chest as it becomes so hard and fast it chokes me from inside. My heart is no longer an organ in my chest, but the violent pounding of drums rising in my ears. The drumming dislodges my soul from my flesh until I become a thin pale hide stretched across the dark chasm of mortality.
The scarred and sacred hands of my ancestors are striking me with closed fists and open palms. They hold ticks and reeds pulled from the waters edge. Carved bone batons splinter on impact.
These beats are battle cries.
Each strike arrives faster and harder than the last, reverberating through me until their tenor blends together in harmony, and all I can hear is her voice – singing my sacred name.
I have only heard it whispered by the ocean waves and the moon’s light.
I cannot look away from her. Primordial Eve. Mountains move across her strong back as her shoulder blades open and contract under her endless labor. The veins in her body are pulsating and threatening to erupt in volcanos. Her skin, the deep color of plowed earth, churned from far below the roots and worms. She is pulling me home.
Life pours out of her in a violent perpetual birth. it is not a crowning. It is a purge. Living. dying. conceiving. Repeating.
I am witnessing the convergence of all things. The eternal scream of the desperation to be done, and the familiar fear of finishing.
The salt smell of the sea and the metallic sting of blood rush my senses. She is not glistening in an external light, she is shining this light from inside.
I can feel the end coming as she rocks back and forth, in large steady swings. The desire to scream her name catches in my throat, but, before I can make a sound, I understand. I have been screaming her name since I was born.
My parched mouth agape, cracking and crumbling with my own pathetic whimpering. I have never been so deprived as I am at this moment. All of my being is burning with desperation. Every cell threatens to explode.
I am overwhelmingly incomplete. Excruciatingly separate and desperate to be with her. She smiles lovingly.
I do not crawl to her on knees and elbows like a child, but surge towards her in a raging, current of life. My clumsy pauper’s hands are tired, yet find youthful furry as I tear away what separates us. She simply shines, watching me make my way.
I am not sure I will ever break through to her, but she is relaxed and knows, the urgency in me is my own unbecoming. The scaffolding of time and flesh break away, and send me falling into her. Arriving, suddenly, in this space of totality.
I claw away what is left of me, a fevered supplication. I expand past the pier of the individual mind, and the relief is overwhelming. Her smell is a dizzying scent of all the familiar things of my life. My mother’s perfume, fresh bread, my grandmother’s cigarettes, the grass breaking under my feet, new shoes, my children’s skin. It is all dancing together and lifting me away. I am no longer yearning. I am there, feverishly sucking and grabbing her breasts to quench the thirst.
Needs I didn’t know I had arrived like mortars in the side of my skull, exploding on impact. I thrash and squirm and just as instantly as they appear, they are soothed and healed. I widen my jaw, begging, as my tongue searches for the pressure point to release her golden flow fully into me.
I am cascading, shuttering, stammering, bleating like a sheep for her flock to return. I grab at her skin and find my fingers sticking to her, melting into her flesh.
I beg her to relieve me.
The oneness happens instantaneously.
I found what was forgotten when I was formed in my mothers womb, as my skin was stretched over my flesh, and the only trace of her left was her name in each breath. I have spent my entire life crying into the dark for her, And now she is here.
I am gulping the rushing current from her. Sucking hard and pulling her nectar into me. My legs wrap around her and dissolve until I am only that golden milk flowing from her. I am burning from inside, and my own breasts, wherever they are in this flowing raging current of creation are heavy and burning. I am an orchestral crescendo. Singing, from beyond the pale confusion of joy and grief, an eternal pulse, and I throb louder, heavier. I flow in wild swirling motions. I am the buzzing song of eternity. there is no start or end.
I was already at her breast before I found her, I was already her – eternity.
My lifelong plague of unnamed suffering was only ever a distraction, an illusion, I am her. Feeding from my own breast, frantically turning inside out. The mother, the daughter , the milk, the sea. An ouroboros of hunger and satiety. The stars arise, and burn and fade away. These seconds, millenia. All of the universe hums inside of my womb. I am creation swelling and expelling. I am in perpetual labor and birth. I am being born, over and over again from inside of this space.
it all leaves me and becomes me. It was me I saw on hands and knees. My breasts hanging heavy and my abdomen thrashing with life.. I am her, laboring all life into eternity. Violence and peace originating from the same seed.
The maddening dance blends itself into a circle of golden light. Silence falls for a moment and then, I am splintering into a genesa. I am each golden line and the spaces between them. I am a lantern hanging in the dark, watching the light fade and emerge again in another lantern swinging in the breeze. All the blades of grass soaking in the sun, connected at their roots, I am them too.
I am air moving myself through the mouth of the bird, calling out to find her chick. I am the chick, receiving this golden worm. I am the worm, wriggling, fighting for my life. I realize. There is no need to fight, I am her, returning home.
This golden milk no longer rushes nipple to mouth. Everything that ever is or was, exists inside of this. Everything is sustained here. There is no me left here, nor her. Just ecstasy.
My chest is full and heavy and the pieces of my body are calling each other back. I can feel my body reassembling, remembering my legs as they stretch and my head begins to throb. Devastation overwhelms me. I know that if I fight this, it will all be over in an instant.
The last of her golden milk coagulates in the corners of my mouth. She begins to take form, just outside of me, and I cast one last desperate glance, hoping to see her beautiful dark skin shine, or, even just the echo of her light.
The space between us grows too rapidly. I prostrate myself in gratitude but she is further away from me than I have ever been from anything in my entire life. A primal sob heaves the connected bones of my body. A vacuum has opened and it is pulling me through the darkness and I can feel my joints swell and the aggression of every moment of my life is restored in the form of pain and anguish. Muscle memory of a life I never asked for.
losing our grip on purpose 