15 Minutes Past Sagittarius

How do I imagine that I love you when I can’t even remember how you look? But neither could I remember colors in the grey of the abyss, and didn’t doubt that green was real, or purple – somewhere. And odors – is remembering a scent knowing it in the same way as smelling it? We could only smell warm stone in the cavern, thanks in no small part to Luis designating that side-chamber as a latrine.

It’s laughable to be wearing sunglasses as I rise in the dim of this shaft, but the saints who came down to us as testament to the resurrection to come warned that the light will hurt unaccustomed eyes. Fading memories below and burning light above; just as Plato said, there are two kinds of blindness – that of the guide who descends from light to rescue those shackled in the cave, and that of the pilgrim who climbs to the sunlit world above. Where you wait.

Luis said we must stay busy, lest our thoughts make us mad. But how active can one be in this capsule? Staying busy is what I’ve always done, and even before going down that fateful day to the lure of gold and copper, images of places I’d been and things I’d done were always fading, so that I sometimes questioned what had been real and what fantasy. Damn sunglasses – no sooner did they close the hatch tight against my arms than they razzed, “Make your nose itch, don’t they?”

Don’t over-think. But there’s nothing to look at except the slate walls of this chute. Suspended between heaven and hell, cut off even from my pale comrades, I can’t feel – am I moving up, or is the tube sliding down? I can’t even drop my head to see whether I actually have a chest, or hands, or legs. The catacomb wasn’t holding me from that promised world above – it’s me that’s been lost. No wonder that your face eludes me, when that chamber has separated me from the man who holds you in his heart. Maybe that’s why, when they learned that the heat had stripped us to our underwear, they sent us new garments, each with our name embossed – not so much because we’ll need them in changing environments from the Hades below, but more as covenant that we will soon be born again as the men we’ve always been.

Then is that pain below simply the gnawing hunger of the body which once housed me, or is it desperation to press against the bosom wherein I placed my heart, to again feel my pulse echoing in your breast? Am I nothing more than the eyes shaded against even these rock walls, and the ears which know only the rumbling and scraping of this capsule? The voice in my earpiece begins to sound like the reassurance of my own faith, now broken off and become an alien fragment of my own mind. In a movie, a man who was asked what women meant to him answered carefully, “Hope.” And before faith there is hope. We pinned our hope to the anonymous drill which found us, our faith seemed justified in the guitar sent back, and the chords Jorge plucked from it restored the ticking of our clock, sounding our mantra that the interminable night must yield to a dawn.

I did try; I grasped at the vision of you even while it was slipping into the shadows, becoming ever more wildly frustrated, like an old man who feels thoughts welling up in his mind yet has lost the gift of speech with which to command them. And the less corporeal you became the more glorious, more divine a thing did I sense that I’d lost, the more those scant words we were able to share became my prayer and your answering promise.

There – I felt that. They warned that the capsule might slow as it traversed bends in the shaft, and would pause right before reaching the surface. And just that suddenly I emerge into a burst of light amongst a crowd of people, so dazzling that it mutes their cheers. Even under the night sky I’m cautioned not to remove my sunglasses, lest I stumble foolishly about. So many hands to guide me, some touching me, even more applauding – as many people as can fit within the light, all wearing the brightly colored vests of rescuers and the helmets of artisans. Unknown faces, but people who’ve suspended their lives to bring me up, as though so long as I was away they were incomplete, shepherds who’ve left their flock to find the few who are missing. One or two do seem familiar now – under the team helmet, he looks just like the president himself, and she the first lady, who before had only been pictures on television and in the newspaper. Everything is more than real, and affirms that this is a world to which I belong.

And there you are – my better half, stepping out of the shadows of my hope. Like getting reaccustomed to the light, it could take time to re-associate you with that glorious spirit for whom I’ve yearned. Don’t over-think – despite Plato’s polemic, I doubt that anyone really can look directly at the sun, but I can look at the moon, and now I behold you. Though I sensed my inadequacy for the Madonna I held in your stead, well, if you aren’t really that angel – a man can’t kiss a spirit. Like the Fenix rising, I feel my flesh filling again. And as fire is to the sun, so my passion is to my love. Come to me. Mm, I’d forgotten how good you smell. Above all others, you make me rejoice to be a man.