a loss of gravity you are briefly and profoundly catapulted out of tangible reality. it is a moment suspended, an out of body experience, the complete removal of the anchor of your skin and bones. a lack of gravity. until this moment, you have measured yourself by the standards of ghosts. you have held yourself to this earth with a wandering anchor whose location you were never sure of. though you have wandered from each other and have been separated by thousands of miles and hours and monuments to the past, you remained tethered, incapable of existing as divided units. with one fall of the guillotine, the tether has been decisively cut. the anchor slips away to rest in the bottom of mariana's trench. you have known for a lifetime that this moment would arrive one day, but as always you are unprepared. a galaxy explodes within: the pain of loss, the unbearable lightness of freedom from the pole by which you navigate, the realization that it no longer matters where you go from here and that it is simultaneously beautiful and wretched, the terrible irony of knowing that the moment in which you have most reached peace with yourself is also the moment in which you lose the last permanent fixture in your turbulent history. now begins the long process of being who i am without you, who i am without reference to you. i am, for the first time, tethered to no one but myself. |