Code of Blackness

Nighttime. I look up: Black. I look down: Nothing. There is no light to speak of due to a heavy cloud cover. Absolute silence. There are no identifiable landmarks upon which I could place any of my senses to distinguish where I am from where I am not. I am floating in space: nothing left; nothing right; nothing up; nothing down. I feel like I am nowhere, but fully absorbed. But I am somewhere. I am here. I know that I am standing amidst all this corn, tough stalks and rough leaves branching at me, pointing away everywhere, pointing my empty stare outwards into this indecipherable code of blackness. I know this because I arrived a few hours earlier for this experience. Back then I could see: the ground, overcome by various growths of green, weeds among the stalks. I saw the sunset, I smelled moisture, I smelled green. Even though I know that I started exactly here, I feel as though I have drifted and moved. I have floated above the ground, the undergrowth, the tallest of the yet-to-fruit corn plants. My legs are sending signals that they are standing on flat ground, but I have doubts. I feel I am floating in a sea of black, in a shroud of emptiness, everything unwound, undone into nothingness.

The nothing isn’t all black, exactly, as my eyes fill with pin-pricks of rainbow light: the rainbow bugs as I call them. I’m swimming, doing a breast stroke through a sea of them, my hands brush these tiny flecks of color away, but they swarm, swimming with me, swirling around the tips of my fingers, playing as smoke. I am a painter now, whisking my hand brushing colored specks all around. Only in this way can I see my brush-hands. Otherwise, I might not know that they were there. I love this beatific painting. I love that I am making it.

My breath, labored. My heart, pounding. My head, resonating with shamanic drumming. I want to start dancing, waving my brushes across the virtual canvas, creating black lines in the rainbow colors with every stroke. My legs quiver and the sensation of ground has all but left them. The ground feels mushy, fluid even. My skin is crawling with rainbow bugs. I’m completely submerged. I gasp for air and a whoosh of pleasure and freshness fills my lungs to capacity.

Am I lost? The physical extensions of me seem to have disappeared. They no longer exist. I am, as I have always suspected, no more than a mind. In this sphere of existence, I am alone. I am alone in this universe. I am this universe.

Then I click on my flashlight. The light shatters the flow of rainbow bugs. Like a shattered pane of glass, my colorful universe falls to pieces before my very eyes, replaced by a faint, eerie pale green hue emanating off the alternating lines of dirt and vegetation. I click my flashlight off again quickly, but the image is emblazoned onto my mind. I shake my head to rid myself of it, but I am unable. Everywhere I look, a still life portrait occupies my line of sight, as if it has burned into my eyeballs. In illumination, I have lost the universe I was so exquisitely enjoying. I have lost the moment of absolute, pure being where I was no more or less than myself. I can never return to that eternal moment as I am returned to the ephemeral world where I’ll walk out of this unfortunate field and back into the normal, day in and day out, routine of “ordinary” life. I am grateful, though, for having had this moment and for having this moment always.