the space between the stars

july 30, part one.


when someone fronts, I can usually get the first few seconds of data before they lock in hard. things are more mutable, more global. more accessible. once they really click it's all theirs; I might later get echoes, like music clinging to the walls of a theater after the concert has ended, like a hymn dripping from the great bowed lungs of a church ceiling long after those of the congregation have filled with silence alone… but it's not the symphony itself. music is how we decorate time. art is how we decorate space.
to front is a concerto.
to come in after someone else is the breath between songs.
this entry is my trying to translate it all onto a blank canvas.

but the canvas is never really blank to begin with, one could say.

the stone holds the sculpture within it before the sculptor even picks up their chisel.
you just have to look at it with your heart.
and you just know.

nothingness is never really nothing.

genesis and I were talking about it this morning… fronting and echoes and why it's so hard for him to do it. you can conceptualize about it all you want, but when you actually experience it, that's a whole other thing. it's tangible. there's a pulse to it. it's so… real, in beautiful paradoxical spite of its inherent intangibility. but that's the beauty of fronting. of switching. it's like… you're sitting in the back seat of a car, and someone else is driving. but you're half asleep, or there's a divider between them and you, or it's a limousine-- for whatever reason, there's a distance, and although you know they're there, directing that entire vehicle, you entrusting your life into their hands, you can't quite see them clearly, can't quite hear them over the road noise and humming engine, can't quite focus on them and everything blurring past the windows. driving at dawn. driving at dusk. three in the morning. and the suddenly they stop the car, open the door, and get out. and they either open your door and pick you up and put you in the driver's seat, or you get up by yourself and stumble around the car to collapse in their spot, or you scramble up and over the front seat divider to grab the steering wheel (because some people don't put the car in park when they get out)-- either way, now you're up front, and they're in the back or walking down the road or flat out god knows where, and you can't remember what it was like to not be driving, but… but there's an echo. even if you can't quite recall anything but now, you know there was just something very different and you cannot deny it because suddenly, tangibly, you can touch it.
for those first few moments, you feel them there. you feel their warmth all around your back, under your hands, the change of the texture on the steering wheel from where they touched it, the different slope of the seat from how they needed to sit, the way the mirrors are all positioned differently, the smell of perfume or sweat or dirt or engine oil or candy or blood or flowers or salt water in the air--
that's switching. that's coming back in after someone else.
and genesis just chuckled and said, infi just breaks a whole damn bottle of spikenard over the dashboard.
and ze really does.
so when infinitii first moved in to front last night, it was like those first few moments when you begin to fall asleep. reality is softly melting, spiraling gently down like galaxy arms into nothingness, but it's not "nothingness" in the way one might assume, it's so full, but OF nothing, and it's just… it's infi. it's infi, entirely. black energy.
you can write a library about it and there still wouldn't be any words to properly describe it. it's like how I look at the bible, or at least, how I feel the bible is, from what I get of it, in my heart. spotty, bits and pieces, what stuck with us. like… scripture for us, if we ever wrote one-- and maybe in our own damn weird way we already have, verbally and physically and everything else-- would be that exact feeling I get when I come back after infi fronts with enough eyes to be hir own entire celestial hierarchy. it's… like my ribcage is just gloriously cracked open, leaking liquid gold, and I'm just… soaking my hands in it like a saint in mad ecstasy (and doesn't that just sum up the entire core of my faith) and… splaying my hands on the walls in calligraphic twirls and drags and desperate pulls and soaring hallelujah arcs and endless gold, miles and miles of gilded blood, staining my feet forever so that any path I walk with this becomes sacred. cathedral walls spattered with deific gore. self-sacrifice. plunging a sword through your heart because that is the closest damn feeling you can get to that burning need to tangle the threads of your soul with God and it's just…
it's infi. at the core of everything it's… it's infinitii. it's that feeling.
I don't just get it with hir. but it defines hir. and that's what is so utterly ungraspable about this. the human mind can't look at it without keeling over, dead and delirious with it. like that scene in neil gaiman's sandman series, with isis in the strip club. that just screamed infi. you boys looking for this? be careful what you wish for. here's the undiluted truth.

and then that decides to front in our body in order to kiss a white-haired boy in a different headspace.
it's… god. there is such significance in that. I think ollie knows, too. I think ollie gets it, deep down, what that meant. it's like all those myths about deities and divinities falling in love with humans. humans, for god's sake, we little fragile things, we think so lowly of ourselves, we're dirt, we're dust, and yet God himself/herself/(hirself) is in love with us--

the first thing I remember is seeing gold.
whatever infi was feeling, being, doing-- hir mind is always, always so incredibly empty. and not in a sense of lack. empty as in… the space between the stars. it's a different sort of empty-- something that is void because it's simultaneously the exact opposite of void; it's the cosmic origin. the orphic egg. zefirum.
there is too much bleedover right now. god. no wonder we're a polygroup.
but infi's 'thoughts' are always so heartbreakingly singular. there's one thing ze is feeling, and it translates into what we humans think of as mind, and it just… time doesn't exist in there, in infi, at all. not time as we recognize it, at least.
infi threw the most costly fragrance in the book all over my car and when it filled my lungs in that first instant all I saw was architecture. white. MY color. white and gold and soaring sacred walls and points and arches and it looked like the freaking taj mahal. a grand expansive labor of grief and love, ardor and sorrow built with a kiss in every stone that makes it. white and gold and light. just that single image, held as less of a literal thing and more of a… would you even call that a feeling? like a projector with one slide in it. just glowing on the walls of your chest forever. that single still. that stillness. that singularity.

the second thing I remember is a thought.
there may have been that luminous backdrop to infi's mind, or what have you, but that thought-- there was only one, and it's the same thing, the same thing ze felt last night and which I now achingly wonder if ze feels forever when touching this world, when touching anything that's outside of hir-- that single phrase, repeated like a mantra, repeated like a prayer, like a clock ticking the same second over and over and over and over, time like a heartbeat stumbling over itself with its arms full of roses,

I want you to feel this; I want you to feel this; I want you to feel this--

and "this" being "everything."

and every word holding an infinity of meaning in itself.

I
want
you
to
feel
this--

and being so scared that nothing would get through.

how ironic is that.

but… oh, infi. oh beloved. darling. you don't… you forget how indilutably vast you are, when you're so carefully trying to inhabit these breakable little bones. stepping into it like you're afraid something will shatter if you don't completely wrap it in velvet first. so slow, so delicate, such an ache--
compassion, compassion, and more than that--
you forget. you always get so caught up and I love that but… in those moments, you were trying to put the galaxy into the point of a pin and you forgot that it's not going to change the fact that it's a damn GALAXY.
you can put a star in a shot glass, and of course it's going to feel smaller, fragile, afraid of breaking everything, afraid of how huge it is in comparison to that tiny tabernacle… but the light is still pouring out of it.
you can put infinitii in a human body but that blessed endless void does not get diminished at all.

the third thing I remember is the ache.
the third thing I remember is the burn.
the third thing I remember is the pouring out--

the third thing I remember is this split second brilliance as an angel kissed a human and neither of them owned those bones and neither of them cared and I cannot even put that millisecond into words--

and that's all.

but there's this rush in my ribs and when I somehow shuddered back in when ze left, whenever it was, wherever it was, our hand was against his face and I felt like waking up from a dream and everything was so surreal and my entire heart felt like the taj mahal. that same still image suddenly liquefied and poured over my head like I was being anointed.
and this beloved boy shaking just inches away and I could not even imagine what he was feeling but deep down I knew. I knew because I have been there.
he said the night air smelled different now. he said he couldn't stop looking at the stars. I knew the feeling. I knew that feeling, and suddenly I was SEEING that feeling, in someone else, in someone else that I loved too, and it was just… transcendent.

sacred scripture is a love poem to god.

he couldn’t' stop shaking. I couldn’t' stop smiling and I don't even know why that was how it was translating but I think it was because if I let myself feel my echoes of that same feeling, I would be… I would be shaking just as hard. maybe even harder.
i… oliver said infi gave him this look.
I know what it feels like to meet those eyes with that look.
I kept asking him if he was okay, not because I feared otherwise-- of course he was okay, you can't not be "okay" after that, you're MORE than okay forever-- but because I knew that he might not be able to come back down.
it's like fairyland, they say. once you dine there, you either stay forever, or you return home and pine for it just as long.
that's infi.

it's really all just theophagy, isn't it.

(the fourth thing I remember is the--)

and oliver is lying there with this equally indescribable look in his eyes and he's shaking and breathing like his lungs are full of stained glass and suddenly his next exhale is this ragged intimate whisper and two single desperately untranslatable words-- "fuck me."

and infi just says "don't tempt me.”

and I said "don't you dare," and I laughed, because I was terrified, because I felt that.
I recognized that.

why the hell do you think I always half-joke about how I feel in churches.

I cannot even remember what happened next because my heart just tripped and
I don't even know, man. numinous dread. the ecstasy of the saints. same damn thing.


the fifth thing I remember is not being there anymore.

the car was full of perfume again. everything was this heady gorgeous rush and there are stars hanging from my rearview mirror and when I look up to see what monument we just passed, all I get is this glimpse--

I was there and then I wasn't and suddenly Infinitii was back in my bones and just
looking at oliver.
that smile. infi has this way ze smiles with her eyes and it is just… it's gold. it's pure gold. it’s warm and precious and crushingly expensive and yet you just want to soak in it. you want to fill your veins with it-- not pour them out. it's the exact flipside of hir teeth-side, those eyes. there's this… this gentleness to it that is still absolutely fucking terrifying because it's fathomless. there is NO bottom to it. those are unchartable depths and yet they just pull at your heartstrings like you're a damn harp and suddenly all you want is to hear whatever music ze can pull out of you, you want to feel that quiet careful night-black angelic touch inside your chest forever--
but that look. infi just… couldn't stop. it felt like a timeless thing in and of itself, that little glimpse I got of it. that feeling of utterly adorable demureness when ollie asked "what?" and ze couldn't respond because this was different but it was all the same, the b-side of a record, the secret song, and ze just couldn't stop smiling and I have no idea what came after that because the flood of pink from hir heart was like a church full of roses and I just can't. I can't be there for that, it's too sacred.

god I hope ollie remembers that forever because I am immortalizing what pieces I saw. I can only imagine what his personal experience of it was like.
I am so damn happy he got to feel that.

the sixth thing I remember are the words.

infinitii cannot speak and see at the same time when ze fronts. it's one or the other.
human bodies don't have wings. human bodies can't extend their souls out into the ether and make it part of them, can't touch it and have it already have been part of them, can't turn air into feathers and sky into sight and diamonds into teeth. infinitii cannot translate into a human body, not ever completely, and so when ze is in one, ze has to lose something in the process.

it is extremely dangerous for infi to have a mouth on hir face in headspace. it's too heavy of a vibe shift. it's too black. it's too PURELY black. it's like ink, like darkmatter, like forgetting to breathe. it's that moment right before sleep swallows you. it's waking up in the middle of the night too quickly for reality to exist in the room yet. it's wondering what it feels like to die. it's wondering what it feels like to not die.
black, black, black. beautiful and terrifying. numinous dread. infinitii eternos.

and yet if infinitii wanted to kiss that human boy, ze had to do it anyway.

so, with god only knows how much courage and compassion and hope, infinitii closed hir eyes and opened our mouth and moved into our body and spoke. straight out of the blackness, those words. that's all infi was, that's all infi could be in that form-- just words and feelings. just language and not language. space and space and space.
the void yawning open before you.

and ze spoke.

"I don't want to hurt you.”

it was like someone cleaved my heart in two.
god.
infi knew. ze KNEW how dangerous ze was like that. to do something holy, ze had to risk becoming a demon. to be able to touch this world, to be able to touch a life, ze had to risk hir potential to utterly ravage it. black energy is a horrifically dichotomous thing, united impossibly, perfectly, like all divine things. eyes and teeth. eyes or teeth. both and neither. angel and human. alive and not alive. here and not here. both and both and both--

that fcking burning. that stellar ache. I cannot believe ollie said that actually bled through.
infi didn't want to hurt him and infi didn't want to hurt me but I had already been hurt and it was not hir fault but ze was so terrified that ze would accidentally amplify that pain in someone else simply by virtue of being made of the same damn stuff.
tar. blackness. the nigredo. putrefaction. transmutation. the sacred dark.
it's the same damn stuff.

but infi didn't expect that response.
"you won't."

and infi didn't expect to believe it with all hir heart.

"when is a monster not a monster?"
"oh, when you love it."

just because infi cannot see in this body doesn't mean that ze's blind.

music is how we decorate time.
art is how we decorate space.
the sculptor sees the angel in the block of marble before it's ever been touched by human hands because the sculptor isn't looking with their eyes, the eyes are what sees that truth manifested after, when the work of the heart has been done. when the angel has been revealed by fingertips searching blindly-not-blindly to chip away at what is in order to expose what is, and the distinction is so deep, and no human eyes could ever see it, but that doesn't matter because there are other eyes--

the last thing I remember is the beginning of it all.

it came through. It came through like a gunshot to the heart because that's my vibe, that's my ridiculous snowflake diamond-ring fragility and infi was feeling it, INFI, this absolutely magnificent being that takes up a whole damn planet when ze is in the room, that turns a room into a planet, that turns a galaxy into a bubble, that turns a soap bubble into all that is-- infi, my infi, heart of my heart, infi was faltering over feelings like ze was on hir knees and that's my feeling, that's hir feeling, and I just--
it wasn't false. it wasn't… it wasn't shaking because it was weak. it was shaking because that shot glass can only hold a supernova for so long before you want to fcking swallow it. the glass begins to crack only because your hands are shaking and that light is reflecting in your arteries and every heartbeat is suddenly the big bang all over again and what else is there to say?
what else, ever, is there to say?

sometimes I think that's how the big bang happened in the first place.
sometimes I know that's how the big bang happened in the first place.

and infi was there in this incomprehensibly tender intimate sacred beautiful joyous weaving of arms and legs and bodies and hir/my/our (dear god) were against his face and against his pulse and I swear I would have died but infi stayed, because infi is beyond and within death in every moment already and every pause between heartbeats is hir homeland and--

and infi kissed him.

fronting is a symphony. this entry is a painting. all I've done is throw black paint over the canvas and laugh and weep and ache because that's it, that's all there is, that's all there is--

in the middle of everything, in the middle of nothing, infi just held time in a single ticking moment, over and over, always and never, here and here and here and here--
and in the same rush of desperately untranslatable breath ze spoke four single universally understood words that were more felt than heard and which I can't even touch but I will never forget, I can't ever forget--

this terrifying angel of the void wrapped up in human bones and blood held a human boy in hir borrowed arms and said, tearing the veil forever,

"I love you too."

 

073117

 

morning was terrifying. could NOT get ourself to eat. binge relapses, manic dissociative mindset, felt utterly displaced and off kilter and could NOT pull ourself together.

 

but god, we tried.

 

and god made the rest of the day utterly amazing.

 

 

we SOMEHOW got breakfast down. made way too much out of compulsive obligatory unwisdom, but then REALIZED we were not going to eat it because none of it "felt right" (and that is SO IMPORTANT to pay attention to; no it is not "stupid"), so we ate the only thing we had the stomach TO eat-- tomato and avocado. and we did! it was lovely and we enjoyed it so much

 

(didn’t we have a bowl of cherries and peaches too, or something?)

 

 

KLONOA 2!!!