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1. I have heard the turning of a thousand pages. That soft susurrus of skin against paper--a moth sound that would calm the most strangulated souls, so all us, every one, we were hushed by a layer of darkness so rich when it struck we called it the velvet hour.
2. We put a hand to our throat. We drank nothing and did not choke.
3. And I was using cheap pens. So that always, there was black stains all along my hands.
4. Somewhere a dragon was sleeping.
5. Because the truth is, that as children, sometimes we wander, as I often did, away from the tide-pools to rockier areas only to discover the sun reflected on water: it is a thunderous moment to see stretched out on the shore such a singular celestial body burning the very corneas until every shadow is ash and the very sea a horizon of gold.
6. We muster all of our courage, gather up the reflection, swallow it, whole, for fear that in the end unless we fight it, it will evaporate us--that velvet hour--with rich folds and nothing, nothing, nothing but being alone.
7. This is the aching process of a child becoming a luminous soul.
8. And the subsequent stumbling back to the populated shores, to the hordes, where we slap hands over our mouths for fear of casting shadows in a shadowless life. Disrupt the subsequent ingenious use of sand into silicone into glasses we wear into the very teeth that reflect white when we stand agape--our ghostly orifices echoing white where they expected to see black.
9. And what she hoped is that I might one day let myself be wide open. And what he hoped is that I might forget these frivolous things.
10. Even when we all know that hope is a small black bird that perches on your soul and never lets go.
11. And I've heard the chorus of a thousand angels singing hallelujah, a sound so profound it's an arrow shot right to the ear drum. With our defenses breached by such a chorus, we can be full of sun, of heaven and so much of life yet unburned.
12. I am the dream, I am the word. I am the silver spaceship hurtling through space. I am the giantess, the star, the saguaro. I'm the smell of coffee at the dawning of the day. I would be a firefly, a lizard. I am the red wagon in the rain. I am the broken arm, the terror, the hope and the cherished. I am the alpha and the zeta, the turn and the screw. The broken hearted.
13. I am merely a woman who has measured out her life with coffee spoons.
14. Because as an adult I sometimes wandered away from the road, past long pastures of grass and marsh, into a stretch of birch trees, whose long white limbs serrate the advancing darkness, fighting off the velvet hour like lone soldiers along a wall. And I wonder how I came to be in these woods alone. When the moon rises up like a ice chip, how easy it is to drink it down, whole.
15. Until every sun and moon we ever swallowed supernovas--bursting every cell in a corona of bright white, silhouetting skeletons, melting lenses and pages and writing and bad skin so there is luminosity channeled outward and in. Until, beacon-like, I could move without myself moving, breaching distance and time to the long-ago friends who might raise their heads and wonder what eerie daylight had come upon them.
16. The aching process of an adult becoming a radiant soul.
17. What they meant was, "I love you".
18. We'll cut our hair short, get a tattoo on the arm, and I will wear a flower at my throat.
19. We drink water. We drink wine. We drink, without ever slaking our thirst.
20. Somewhere a dragon awakens.
21. I've upgraded to using expensive pens, yet still somehow I find those same black stains all along the ridges of my skin.
22. Singed and curled the velvet hour has left us entirely exposed. To the crushing light of the summer times. So intense that when it comes we call it sharp.
23. Yet we are not afraid of being cut, and never shall be again.
24.
25.
26. And while they come and go speaking of Michaelangelo, I sit between in that twilight hour. And, as always, I am writing a manifesto.