The Girl at the End of the World

The only reason she wanted to be a dancer was that all she ever wished for was to do one thing so beautifully that everyone’s heart would stop and they would melt forever in an eternal ephemeral instant beyond time that would linger in the afterglow of their lives and they would never forget that moment of perfection, that absolute wonder and joy. Just one moment when it would be as if she had burst into flames and could ignite the warmth in even the coldest hearts, the girl who when she was 11 in Sunday School and the teacher talked of how great Jesus’ sacrifice had been piped up and said, "I would do that," because of course, who wouldn’t go through any agony, any suffering, any pain, to save the world (and especially if in 3 days you get to come back to life, but the nuns were mad enough without that comment). She never knew it was a world that never needed saving. A world that never needed any one to do any thing at all, for the beauty and the love were never missing.

All that time, all those apparent years of tears and sorrows and imagined suffering, nothing had ever truly been lost, nothing was even there to be lost, it was there all the time, this love burning like a perfect single flame illuminating the darkness and inseparable from darkness and light and neither illumination or its absence, and yet all those apparent years she had never seen it.

But hadn’t it always been felt, isn’t is actually always only ever this, and so what if it has no name most of the time, so what if most dreamlings don’t have a thought or an idea of it, is it not felt watching a sunset, in the kiss of a lover, in the ringing notes of a guitar, in the shimmering reflection of moonlight over the lake, in holding hands, in blood spilling and watching someone you love take their final breath, in the plaintive wail of the sirens crying with imagined pain, in the children laughing and the children crying, in the forests blooming and the forests burning, in the rain and the lightning, in the solitary tear that flows down her face as she looks out across this world that she has imagined and has imagined her, as she knows that one imaginary day at the end of the book of fables called her life she will slip into the folded corners of the pillowy clouds of what is and never was at all, and dream of nothing as the last flicker of awareness slips beneath the surface of the infinite edgeless sea, her final thought that there was always only ever this, this perfection, this nameless beauty, this unfathomable love, and it has never belonged to anyone and is never found anywhere, for it is simply what you are, who you are, however that appears, and there is no need for one perfect beautiful ultimate act, whether art or awakening, for every single appearance is already ineffable ethereal perfection, dancing as this, dancing as you my beloveds, in all the ways life seems to appear, dreaming itself into and out of the heart of everything and no thing at all… ♥