“Fuck,” he said, fresh stepped into a pile of dog-shit on the corner of 186th and Laurel Hill Terrace during a time of cold beers, Black and Milds spliced with marijuana, and the declination of grammar.

After scraping the sole of his shoe along the curb, he pushed between two cars tightly parked. He hit the bodega down the block and dropped a few dollars on a quadruple espresso, cooled it with cream and chugged it walking down the block towards his apartment building.

The space of the studio quieted when he entered and with a slack pace he’d sit leaning back in the chair, feet on the desk set against the north/northeast corner windows of a top floor Washington Heights pre-WW2 apartment opening up to a view of everything north of his position in the Heights.

No tall structures rose to blot the view, no neighbors could peer in and so the large window remained without curtain and instead of a pressing city, a flat landscape of mostly moon grey building tops spread out, quilted above with a vast sky and he knew that G-d loved him.

The clouds, sometimes roiling, other times still, or set in a space drifting in uniform melancholy across the atmosphere, were portals for meditation. Time allowed infinite variety and when only a bright pale blue shone, he’d squint against the sun as day rolled slowly into night, into stars and wonders, his mind contemplating on these advancing distances, their slow waltz through space in time, but most importantly, he spoke with G-d during these meditations, in conversations unfurled without prejudice, reminiscing on those who were kings, like the best of their yolk, gathered to fathers wanting too.

He wrote out these conversations with Kerouacian diligence, their occurring by way of thoughts and forms, patterns and fractals, then flowing onto paper into piles of manuscripts scattered about the trail of his passage.

He could not keep up with them and worried about their archiving. But they would be, his master stated, to give his kids, his lovers, for posterity, a bit of the travels that took him from one end of the world to the other.

The thoughts always returned to the roundabout, that analog spinning mechanism on the playground. He remembered it from his youth, twirling, and his friends one by one jumping onto it; he could never time it right. Fear gnawed at him then, and today. He knew it wasn’t only a lack of timing.

A light pulse became present, not unlike the presence of amphetamines, but accompanied with visuals. A kind of inner grind, his teeth, hips, he had to flex his feet and caught a glimmer of light, bluish, in the corner of his eye. An electric star hiding in the upper left hand corner of his focus. The effect was mild, almost so he reveled in the subtlety, forgetting what was coming, how the reef springs onto the vessel’s hull.

Becoming fatigued, the event unraveled slowly. His sweat cooled in the room’s air which was fresh and moving, while his presence drifted with detachment; sounds coming on percussive, remote and rolling to and fro, slowly as tides, revealing and hiding pools of syncopated moments. Interspersed, as rocks jutting out from sandy shorelines, distorted sounds against a fluid audible. He knew, quietly, but he could never concede this, why she had thought him insane, the parallels were awfully uncanny.

Visually, the affectation arrives and he feels clammy. He feels outside his body, like cold nights under only sheets, as though he is lacking a shell and his soul is cooling, condensing into beads of euphoria desiring union. He is yet to become afraid and so must remember, force the recollection of what is coming. He senses it now, the turning welling up and he swallows the panic punching out of him. The door, he must slam it on the tentacled grip of this pariah, his body, the house in this room stretching, the isolation punishing him through gravity, till the door is bulging, the room is being squashed and that force is advancing, it is seeking him out.

Nobody to call as his fears increase, the anxiety pushing his guts out and nausea rising in him. His parents are exempted, his loves have fled him and the vast expanse of his faith, that dogged nature of his trust, infantryman like, ramped up with determined loyalty. He is alone and must overcome this riptide of fear pushing him down, crushing these cells into the dust. The emptiness, the pale glow of this barren room recalls the frightening solitude of his place, our Earth’s setting, on the water’s skin.

He is not communicating well. The pressured speech, quick breaths hamper him, and he feels robbed of being normal at this stage, the wave of awe curling forward just over the wall of terror which falls on him first. He wakens in the battle goaded into exertion, realizing the peak has yet hastened it’s arrival and he’s suddenly afraid of what’s coming, since, as it is stated, “beginnings are always difficult.”

Washing his hands, his face, with soap first, after, through ritual, the reptilian markings of his animal-hood bloom into presence and he reads the ledger inscribed on his countenance. Light contorts around the object of focus, the outer parts moving, constricting, as though gravitational lensing has been microcosmed. The self washing out into fluid light, leaking onto the aged oak planks of his flooring as though the sun hides behind you and only the corona, fiery and fluid, licks at the space, accompanies the object, and suddenly, It arrives.

A terrible, crushing weight, as though the whole of the cosmos have drained into a point inside his being, forcing him down, breathless, gasping, clutching for an object to support him and he collapses onto the floor in raw, naked shame, the regret boiling out of him. The space presses down onto him, the arrogance of his want torn out of his heart, his mind unable to breathe, and he cries out with a torrential anguish, crumpled on the flat plane of wooden flooring, empty of value, lacking meaning and an embarrassment to his ancestors, his providers of light. He cannot catch his breath enough to sob and his eyes go blind with tears and still, facing this demise, he is afraid to confess lest it be real and final for all time.

The fire in him, that does not consume, speaks up, gently, nurturing and fills him, warming the hollow of his terror, saying,”if it be that final moment then do not hide, you are loved and desired.”

Suddenly, as though finally able to move forward, the shock lifts and he does so, with this personal redemption and vocalizes aloud that he knows from this spot he may never return and despite the shell of his person, he admits to the vulnerability that he will end, he will be known in light without the blankets of flesh that hide and all details become understood with excruciating exactness. He cries out in that moment fearing his soul will depart from the horror and pleads for mercy and compassion and understanding, that She return to him, in this moment, when he has struck a pinprick in the barrier that hides them from each other. He has provided Her with that She seeks out.

He loves Her, pours out his lacking, gives Her the neediness which animals despise, and returns the great love She exudes and he knows now they are lovers renewed and he laughs aloud.

Calmed by Her presence, he climbs the ladder to his bed, sits back, spine straight, against the wall, and swallows the isolation up until he arrives and understands that one new thing waiting all these millenia for discovery, a gift from the river’s current, and the place of Her reign increases and he is grateful, and for Her is the moment at its first breaching.

Keep digging, architect at the site, don’t quit. The find is present but obscured in the many layers of dust caked as dirt, dried, baked mud, and him, with delicately applied fingers, despite their awkward thickness, brushing away the crumble until that cherished Something lost is newly discovered, again.

Discovery is not creation but the Creator desires this discovering as though they are creations, worlds, even limited as it all is to these infinitesimal moments scarcely present in the great ribbon of our being.

Later, drunk on the come down, most importantly, alone, his thoughts focused on not losing this involvement, on remaining with the righteous masters that have departed, staying alive, he sought out, with desperation, to remain that child who found the wooded acres full of everything desirable worth finding.

But, he was beginning to understand the practical difficulty with aging. Gravity and time, the soul, the heaviness pressing into her, wearing away at the body and its splotches, bruises, failing components, until the form, finally at rest, lay hidden among the dusts, atoning.

And despite this, these meditations unravel, through nebulae, through process, the river’s flow never-ending.