My small hands rested on the cool concrete like teacups on lace. The coolness pushing on my palms comforts me in way I can't exlain. The day was warm and cold as early Spring and I admit it was deliriously beautiful. It satisfied my senses greatly, the oyster of a sun brushing against my fair skin while the brisk breeze rushes through my hair like a song. It was beautiful and helpless. There I sat perfectly alone, the giant earth around me swallowing up my tiny bones, and there I helplessly sat with big blue eyes trailing the invisible beelines of moving people, talking people, laughing people, people, people, people. They're every-which-way it seems. I don't mind feeling small. In fact, I love it. The moment when the earth is telling you there is more to you than yourself, that is the moment of feeling small and knowing it.
Then something happens.
It begins softly in your right ear drum.
Then your left.
Two different noises transforming the world around you.
A voice emerges, and it's different.
It isn't singing to you, it's singing inside of you.
Is it your own voice or the sky's?
You cannot tell.
It counts down.
Slowly.
Calmly.
Then all at once--your're gone.
The stars you cannot see are touching you, telling you something, dancing within you. The world around you changes into sparks of color, shooting light, dancing darkness all around your tiny body.
It's marvelous.
My head begins to tip back as it knows this is a beautiful moment I may never feel again in my small lifetime. My long hair trickles down my back, across my neck, two braids intertwining with my spine. I close my eyes. It's what I always do to see the magic. The sky is bluer than I've seen in such a long Winter time, it's astonishing. Riveting. Stupefying. This life really is lovely you know and I think the earth can feel me loving it. Suddenly I look away and there's someone watching me from a high window.
It's a boy I do not know, staring at me intently. Who does that besides me?
What does he see I wonder.
I wonder so hard I'm staring at him too and he doesn't look away for sometime. It's so incredibly strange it makes my heart leap for joy. A soft smile tugs at the corners of my lips, like it did when I first closed my eyes at the sky today. Finally, a brave human being after all. If I remember right, I look away first and then our eyes never meet again.
How much did he notice?
People hardly notice anything at all, these days. It's tragic really.
I don't pride myself in saying I see anything at all, but I do stop and allow myself to feel small every once and a while and that is enough to know this life is more than what most people see it as. Of that I am certain. The ground around me pulled over my head like a blanket as I touched the blue sky with my soft pink lips and tickling eyelashes. I know this life is more than my pounding heartbeat. I know the words that drip down my rib-cage are not my own. Nothing belongs to me without belonging to the earth first. Everything we are connects to the roots we cannot even see most of the time. The roots that writhe and wriggle without ceasing constantly living below and within and above us.
How marvelous is this life anyway?
One moment you can touch the sky and kiss the clouds inside your tangling hair and the next you can fall so deep inside the dirt below, you won't even recognize yourself all small and damp and new. If I could feel like the nothing of the earth every moment, I would. If I could turn myself into a small seashell beating against the wild ocean becoming something different, something exquisitely strange with every wave that beats against me, I would.
If I could sing as nostalgic and childish and a wind chyme, I would every moment.
I would kiss every person I ever fell in love with even for an instant if I could. I would make them feel the love I've never received but I know someday I will. Kiss them sweetly, they could taste the passion I hardly exude to anyone but myself.
I'm kind of selfish that way I think to myself.
I try to forget about my own existence as Kiersten for a moment, losing myself in the dirt I came from, the stars that are buried within a higher place I cannot name. I feel God in every moment of my forgetfulness. He is there in every dig, every tug of my spirit, every excursion into the soul He claimed as my own. Why does He love me so endearingly? Why doesn't He forget about me as easily as I do about Him? Where can I turn from the selfishness that has become me?
Please.
Tell me I am worthless.
Turn to me and remind me that I am nothing compared to the vast, prepossessing world above me.
Whisper to me all the horrors I whisper to myself in the night I know are true.
But you won't.
You could if You wanted to, but You never will do that.
You will never make me feel smaller than necessary.
You, for a reason I may never name while I am inseparably apart of this earth, love me beyond anything You have created. Anything. Everything. Why?
Father.
I whisper pathetically quiet.
Why do You love me?
Don't you know what I am?
It's deathly quiet for a while and I can't confess it scares me because it sickly calms me in way that drives most humans mad.
When you learn to listen you find answers you were never even looking for.
It's quiet for a while before a crack in the clouds breaks again and I can hear something softly.
It's like a small song bird chirping a tiny melody,
only making one sound.
My name.
How exquisite.
It's my Rescue Song.
Just so.
-kiersten pauline benson
"Space Oddity" by: David Bowie
II/XXVI/MMXVI
