crass fiction

When I received the late Sunday night phone call, my heart pounded as I raced to answer it. Customarily, this was my day of rest, after a typically relentless week of fielding numerous pseudo-emergencies, both personally and professionally. Instinctively, I knew that this urgency was very real.

Disbelief and panic echoed in the voice of my caller, the husband of a dear friend of mine, informing me that she had just been in a tragic accident. As the details filtered in, our male egos dissolved, through the catalyst of his grief and my shock: in a coma… critical care… near-drowning… possible brain damage. My inward response to hearing this was a bold proclamation of dissociative denial: ‘No fucking way!’

I learned that my friend Amara had been walking on the beach near her tropical home when she encountered a young boy flailing in the surf, trying to rescue his small dog. Being the patron saint of both animals and children, Amara didn’t hesitate before jumping in to try to save the pair. Perhaps because she knew this stretch of ocean so well, Amara was able to pull the boy and his dog from the water separately and escort them to safety. However, she had nearly drowned in the process of doing so. If not for the boy’s quick thinking (calling emergency from her cell phone, which he’d retrieved from the purse she had flung onto the sand before delving into the water), she never would have even made it off the beach alive.

After I hung up the phone, my eyes darted to an aesthetic greeting card next to the phone on my desk. I had been saving the card specifically for Amara. Impractically yet instinctively, I filled thee blank card with a written invocation: ‘You will wake up. You’ve come too far to let go of the promise of your purpose.’

I had no doubt that if Amara died now, she would do so fully at peace with the life she had thus far lived. I supposed that her richly cultivated spirit might even manifest in another blazing reincarnation. But I wanted her here and now: in this body; in this life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to continue living without her; it was more that I simply couldn’t imagine the world without her in it.

Amara had saved my life emotionally – at one point, we were lovers for a brief time – and I knew that this was my chance to return the favor, albeit psychically. Deliberately and forcefully, I retracted my energy deep within me. Projecting my consciousness several thousand miles away, I envisioned myself entering the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where Amara was being monitored. Just as my awareness entered Amara’s physical space, the alarm bells on the vital statistics monitor beside her bed went ballistic. In a flash amidst the cacophony, I witnessed her unmistakably diminishing signs of life and the chaos of the medical rescue team as they converged upon her hospital room.

Amara herself was completely detached from all the earthly commotion. Immediately, I sensed that she was preparing to leave this corporeal plane. Instantaneously, I reached out for her mind and spirit in a gentle yet profound psychic choke-hold. Reiterating the same command that I had written only minutes earlier, I said aloud “You will wake up. You’ve come too far to let go of the promise of your purpose.”

As I reached for and held Amara’s essence, I felt her rise to meet me, letting go of her blissful free-fall into the Void. I felt her serene smile subsume me in a nodding acknowledgment of my passionate command, and I knew in that moment that our sacred filial covenant for this lifetime had been restored. Every fiber of her being responded to my implied reminder, echoed in the clear recognition of her one-word answer:

“YES.”

It is in solitude – always in solitude – that the guard of my masculine nature and identity ebb. Then, my genderless awareness of my humanity fully unfolds. It is then that I feel her presence most powerfully: when the prolific psychic residue of the ‘motion in stillness’ that she embodies lingers. The words ‘intuitive’ and ‘aware’ do not even begin to describe her effortless yet omnivorous understanding, her brilliant tabula rasa mind, and her remarkable capacity for profound tenderness.

In the wake of feeling her gentle yet phenomenal presence – and the subtle but unmistakable void of her absence – my apartment looks exactly the same to the naked eye. But whole new, transcendent worlds have been birthed from our symbiotic visceral reciprocity.

Our always-immanent metaphysical attraction seems to be taking the course of our lifetimes to evolve into something more carnally fulfilling. If our sexual expression ever equals the intensity of our exquisite rapport, we will both be willingly consumed by an ever-expanding concatenation of exuberant, balls-to-the-wall stamina marathons of athletic eroticism.

Tonight, she held me cradled in her lap, ensconced in her impossibly comfortable curves and silky soft skin. With sensitively skilled fingers, she unwound my stressed muscles in a masterfully knowing massage that was an extended foray of deep-release bliss for me. Beyond tension relief, it was an overall amelioration of my well-being.

Her instinctive talent for nurturing is as inexhaustible as my own need to be so thoroughly nurtured. It is a powerful reverence which bypasses romantic notion: the unconditional embrace of the Cosmic Mother. In truth, no one had ever held me as compassionately and adoringly except for my own mother, and that was a distant memory from many years ago.

Delicately, she broke the sweet spell of our shared silence by gently kissing my forehead and saying only, “Namaste.” (This translates roughly as the light, or the highest good in me salutes the light, or the highest good in you). It was a simple gesture and a single word that nonetheless felt like the fruition of the covenant of the holiest of Holy Grails.

Feeling starry-eyed and consummately relaxed, I slowly roused from the altered states that her extended healing had induced in me. Propping myself up on my elbows, I then turned to face her. Then I leaned in to meet her in an eyes-wide-open, serenely ravenous and lingering tongue-kiss. Many mind-blowing moments later, she broke the magnetic connection of our osculation by touching her fingers lightly to my face.

In a sultry tone which did not belie her seriousness, she said, “When we have more time, we will do far more justice to this. If I possessed the skill to alter the time/space continuum – and the unforgiving rhythms of our earthly lives – I would have you with me for hours, days, weeks, months, years… into timelessness. Until then…”

I held her to me and finished her sentence aloud, saying, “Farewell is never goodbye.”

Somewhere in the middle of the sultry summer night, nature called. My lover unzipped the front flap of our tent and we headed outside onto the sand of a secluded beach cove along the southern California coastline. As we were alone, we exited the tent nude. A pleasurable breeze greeted us, briefly alleviating the swelter. Even with a nearly-full moon, the lush ceiling of stars above us was breathtaking. Adding to our overall feeling of auspiciousness, a shooting star fell seemingly directly in front of our path. My jaw dropped in awe, and I wondered aloud a most sincere approbation, “Oh, how you bless us God, life, spirit, universe…”

With that grateful invocation, my lover and I proceeded to relieve ourselves in the majestic ocean. (We rationalized that our good actions far outweighed this relatively minor infraction.) The shock of contrast between our warm bodies and the still-cool water was exhilarating. We dove under holding hands, then after we arose, we exuberantly collided in a delicious, playful kiss. As we separated our bodies ever-so-slightly, we noticed a captivating phenomenon: the bright light radiated by the moon cast us in an immaculately explicit, lucid shadow against the backdrop of pristine sand.

As we stood in the ocean, we were bewitched by watching the exquisite subtleties of our well-matched physiques. Every slow, sensual move we made was mirrored and magnified in the remarkable chiaroscuro of moonlight and shadow. In my heightened state of arousal, I felt my skin turn incarnadine, like a lust-drenched niacin flush. Without needing to accede, my lover and I met each others’ unspoken desires, choreographed in equal parts by erotic providence and spiritual syncretism.

Deliberately, we decided to delay the consummation of our mutual yearning until we got back to the tent. Both of us later confessed our suspicions that we might have literally drowned due to our sensual distraction. We returned to the tent giddy, overly-amped and very ready to merge our inner empyreans. As we made love, time became evermore malleable and fluid, its interstices seemingly yielding to our mutual need for extended, undulant erotic equanimity.

It was the ultimate power trip: we were reveling in the complementary, egalitarian nature of true inner power. Luxuriantly supine, I decided that if I had to die, I’d like to do it with him inside me, in precisely this position. But for the moment, I was ravenously consumed and consummately nourished by the vitality of living abundantly.

When I awoke a few hours later in the full illumination of dawn’s gorgeous color palette of light, my lover was momentarily gone. Resting on my belly was a velvet drawstring bag, sewn in the design of a labyrinth. Inside the bag was a smooth, flat dark-grey large stone that was a lapidary masterpiece. In Celtic-inspired calligraphy, it read in Latin:

ab ovo, ut terminus

et ab novus orsa

saecula saeculorum.

On the other side of the stone was the English translation:

from the beginning, to the end

and from the new beginning

to all eternity.

My lover returned in time to witness the resultant awe I felt at reading such lofty words which I had inspired. My stupefaction derived from being so comprehensively recognized and acknowledged by someone so much like myself. We kissed deeply, and as we prepared to delve again into erotic joy, I had an amazing epiphany:

Whole, healed lovers everywhere are the living antidote to Pandora opening the Box. By unleashing harmony, joy, understanding and reverence, perhaps we may break the spell of all the ills that have been cast upon this world.