the moonlit garden

What is happening to me?

I was happy. Well, content: I had — and had had — a life, a good one, a rich one — I was ready to go. No hurry to be gone, but ready. Any time.

Now I stand in the garden in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, not wishing to sleep, wanting only to soak in the moon's cool light, as it sinks into me like the touch of my beloved's hands, breathes in me, shivering me, all certainty shattered, falling all around, like standing stalks when the band is cut.

A voice within me ventures: I've been here before, I know what this is, what is taking place in me — but that is simply not true. No one can have been here before, ever: one is only ever here — or not. When not, this... This — is a blank, cannot be seen, or felt, even known about. One can remember having been here, or try to imagine it, but being here... — that cannot be reached by remembering or imagining.

But once here — is it a here? yes, that will do — you know where you are, who you are: you are the one here, dreaming of, longing for, this other one, this one, now, here within you, breathing with you, eyes in you, as when in each other's arms in the velvet dark.

The moon may be sinking, but I cannot see that, or feel it — I will only know that has happened afterwards, when it has sunk. Here, now, there is no before, no after, only the moonlit garden, the thrumming light, the opened place within me, filled, spilling.