Chapter Two
The seconds after Benjamin
disappears are filled with a sort of static, like there is a residual presence
in the air around me.
My encounter with him has left me
feeling numb and my head overfilled with information. So I am a ghost, and no one
can see me but other spirits. I close my eyes again, making sure I didn’t
imagine the whole thing.
And there it is, a million,
billion pinpricks coursing across my skin. I see, but not with my eyes, and
everything I view is on the other side of a translucent curtain. The shadows of
everything and everyone that ever was. An infinity of voices without words, an
eternity of lost loves, yearned for wishes and dreams, never to be accomplished
on mortal earth.
But there is hope too, and I find
it harder to see. The occasional gleam of happiness that lifts my spirits in so
much dark.
I open my eyes again and start to
feel dizzy, like I’m slipping down an increasingly slippery slope behind me. I
panic without meaning to. I can sense the gaping maw of the Edge behind me.
Feel its chaos, so close but a million miles away. I was going to have to get
used to my new gifts. I had no great desire to enter that place again. Benjamin
had said that it was only terrifying if you let it be, but from where I’m standing,
it makes my lack of skin crawl.
Because that is strangest thing,
and it’s what drags me back to my new reality. I grip hold of my left wrist
with my right hand.
Before I know what’s happening,
it goes numb, it feels see-through,
as though it’s not there at all.
As my fingers feel my still warm
skin, I am grounded again. It’s all in my mind. The Edge is my mind. Maybe I’m
more connected to it now I don’t have a body? I could never say if my musings are
true, I have so many questions to ask Benjamin, so many that only occur to me
now.
I am truthfully a baby in this
new form of body, and I know it will take me a while before I take my first
confident steps.
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