Blue's Creation

By David Woodward

 

It was so close to perfection. Not that I believe in perfection. But the idea of it is implanted in my being. I crave something that will draw me nearer to it. Perhaps it is near perfection that I desire the most. A little flaw is always delightful; it points to the perfect and says, don’t we look good together. But how much imperfection is needed? How much can we stomach? Does a big flaw look as good next to a little perfection or vice versa? Is one person’s perfection another’s imperfection? . . . We haven’t really gotten anywhere, have we?

I’ll rebegin from the beginning.

It was so close to perfection. It made me hungry. For more. More, more I wanted. It drew out the insatiable that dwelled within, always yearning for more, more. Perfection, or so close to perfection, seems to have that effect on me. It’s a drug. I think it might increase my endorphin levels. As I draw closer to you, my mind-body connection pulses with this dopamine surcharge.It takes me further out of myself. I am never myself around you.

How can I be? I’m all doped up. You are my dope. At least, you produce the dope in me. So, in a way, you are the drug. Are you toxic? Like any other drug, in large doses, you probably are. I will try to use you wisely. But not today.

I am with Blue, today. We stretch on for infinity. There is no place that we are not. You are the sky. I am the sky. I know there is darkness . . . out there. But in here, there is blue. We have been lovers since time began. We swam in waters before we even had fins. We were taken where the tide took us. I was swallowed by you the first time we met. You opened wide and I entered, prepared for my fate. Together, we ate the other inhabitants.

We ate the sun. We ate the rain. We ate meteors that fell into our domain. We rose beyond the heavens and came back down holy and renourished, sanctified and insatiable. You taught me to be the sky when I lived in the ocean. You taught me to live in between right and wrong. You taught me to see, to feel, to grasp onto the other side. We were painters. Blue was our choice of creation. It was in between suffering and joy. It was eager for more. More, more it wanted. There was no stopping it. It drove us mad. We pushed ourselves to the limit. We had no limit. But we wanted one. Just so that we could go to it. We wanted to see what it was like. We wanted to see what it would, or could do, to us. But it just kept going on and on and on . . .

 

I am in love, today. I am filled with you; don’t you know that? Once, we were separate in our togetherness. Then, we were united, whole and purified by the near perfection of our creation. Was it our creation? I think it was our desire. Is that the same thing? It is now impossible to find you. But the desire to recreate you is gone. My hunger is your hunger, and your hunger is safe. It lives in the infinite possibility of improbable being. We have salvaged the earth. We have devoured the sky. We have sunk to the deepest depths of the ocean. We have existed well into the present. We are alive in now.

 

Epilogue

 

Do you remember when we used to gaze into late day sky? We had left the ocean at this point as I recall. We thought the sky was the ocean. We tried jumping up into it. We climbed the highest mountains hoping that we could reach it. When we couldn’t, we’d jump, and we’d tumble down to our deaths. We were reborn so many times that we lost count.

Do you remember? Every new life we’d jump from the tallest mountains to our inevitable demise. It became a game. We couldn’t stop, could we? We’d only do it on purely cloudless days. The blue had to stretch on forever. There could be no break. On those days, so close to perfection, we’d hold hands, gaze into each other’s earthly eyes before raising them above, in search of the limitless blue, thenjump. Once, the ocean had caught us. We sank like missiles. Deeper and deeper we plummeted, the waters going on seemingly forever.

When we touched bottom, we thought we were home. But we couldn’t see a darned thing. You built us a home inside an old shipwreck. You were aided by phosphorescent creatures. They said they knew you well. They were blue, just like you. They helped us paint the old wreck. It was the least that they could do. We lived inside the ruin with the blue creations until it was time to recreate the past.

We told tall, mostly true tales by an underwater volcano. It built a mountain.

And of course, we had to jump off it. It took us to the surface. We floated until we reached a strange, carapace-like island. We ate coconuts and dates and the odd tortoise, who offered themselves because they were so old. We are ready for our deaths, they told us. We lived off the backs of the ancient turtles, travelling through the waters as we stepped from one moving island to another. At the edge of the earth, eons before it became round, we jumped.

 

We landed, once again, into blue.

 

David Woodward from Canada lives just south of Montreal with his wife and son. Recently, he was published by Poets Choice and Light of Consciousness, and will appear in North Dakoda Review and Down River Road from Nairobi.