Open

I must write, for I have been cut open.

How easily it was done, when it sliced through me like butter left out in the humid spring evening. Weeks of groundwork had been laid, chipping, chipping away at my outer shell until it had no choice but to show its fault lines. There was a gap—a gap! I had been solid for far too long, but tonight did it, the knife came out and in it dove, gliding with no resistance through the unknown phantasmal solids and liquids and bones and spirits I hold within.

In this moment, I am open.

I look down from above and there are my two halves, all soft and honeyed. It can all rush in—yes, it—that subtlety, the subtlety I so miss and crave. It went away from me for some time, and I know not why. The city? The era? The strong certainties of other souls?

No, I am open. Goodbye brute strength, for I am soft. There is a power in it, far different from any kind of assurance that can be marched beneath. My banners, put up by others, burn and disintegrate into sweet ash over my openness.

So we all raise a standard

To which the wise and honest soul may repair

To which a hunter

A hundred years from now, may look and despair

But I do not look and despair—I look and take unearthly, overwhelming delight. Everything is achingly alive, the energy of each being and thing that I can see rises to the surface and swims eagerly just beneath the sugar-glass containing it.

The clouds bear a golden light that cleaves through the modernity of Edinburgh. Into the gaps rise the church spires, Arthur’s seat, each blade of grass standing together on the flat expanse of the Meadows . . .

The smell of it all is unbearably heady. I, who cloak myself in Winter, am cut down by the sudden sublime onslaught of spring. How new the scent is, the new flowers and new leaves and new earth.

Rain patters down mischievously. It mingles with the golden light and the dark grey clouds and the pale northern sky and such a palette buries into me with breathtaking power for truly, how can it not.

I smile as a raindrop hits the very tip of my nose; a kiss from the skies, perfectly placed.

I am in love with it all, ah, how could I have forgotten? This is what I live for, these experiences, this subtle tasting of the ethereal blood of the earth, drawn for my lips from some unknown source.

They will not close me again. Subtlety, subtlety, subtlety, envelop me in your indistinguishable colours. Together we shall shun the black and the white, the never-ending screams of the internet era that howl from some bottomless pit, that declare they know what is best and they like and dislike this and that and oh, how they fly into an outrage at the state of their surroundings.

No good can come of it, you know that. Rise, gentle soul, rise within and find me once more. You have been buried beneath piles of heavy soil, weakened by some poison that I mistakenly took. Could there have remained a few sour drops of duplicity beneath my tongue?

My softness looks beyond that, looks within at the open expanses, where the rain has washed away such mercurial attempts at my very life. I am clean, I am new and I am old—someone somewhere pulls an invisible thread and my selves that had once fragmented come careening back together into one shockingly familiar whole.

The subtlety, the softness, the ability to widen the perspective and see all that truly matters in the long waking hours of the earth. I clutch these things near to me, frantic and elated and delirious and euphoric, for I have been opened once more.