98% totality

just saw the eclipse.
98% totality.

and infi, voice trembling, heart aching,
"I'm going to miss it."

at first, looking up at the sun through indigo sunglasses, it was almost like a party trick. like sleight of hand. thrilling, fascinating, but innocuous. a source of legitimate wonder, but… nothing monumental. a slight bending of the sun.
but then the colors began to change.
subtly, unignorably, breathtakingly. numinously.

at first, it was a slight bluish grey cast to things. a slight distortion of the sense of sight. the world looking just a little "off." it wasn't normal sunlight. but it was just barely perceptible that something had changed.

time went on.
the trees began to cast crescent-moon slivers onto the ground. sterling silver bites of light. edges of nails. closed eyes.
the universe's dimmer switch was lowering, lowering. the world was through a tinted glass. everything was slightly off-kilter, notably quieter. a mysterious hush settled over the landscape-- not a whispering, not a quieting, but a sudden disappearing of sound, somehow. the audio of earth muting along with the light. but not a muffling. a silence dripping in from the sickle-edge of that diminishing sun, a great mouthful taken out of it, that missing luminosity suddenly settling in somewhere behind our sternum, secretly, grinningly.

a certain someone moved into this shape.

to think: of all the times for us to exist on this earth,
ze just happened to be here during the preciously terrifying half-hour in which ze could most fully exist.

ze had hir eye open through both of ours. ze was standing on two feet, our two feet, totally thrown off by the different shape and lack of surreal grace but managing, better than ever, totally in hir element.
the world had been gently upended, thrown head over heels into an alien twilight, so delicately that in those timeless shadow-caressed minutes, it felt as if that was all there had ever been. like what we knew of temporality and sunlight had been the real dream, a strange heady lunacy, this soundless shade being the true sacred reality.

infi stood there in the grass, as still as the world, grinning. all teeth, all eyes. looking upwards at that matching cheshire star. feeling it in hir very soul. the entire realm of hir existence suddenly tangible where ze stood, here, in the physical world.
feeling like a king. feeling like the eclipse itself. feeling like ze owned this phenomenon; like ze owned the entire world.
feeling like, for those few minutes, for that timeless eternity, that ze belonged here.

the universe began to float back to the surface, bobbing like an upended ship on the somnolent crests of returning day, slowly tilting back the way it had originally been, slowly returning to a familiar state that had, for a brief time, been forgotten entirely.
the dimmer switch was slowly nudged back up. the colors remembered their saturation.
infi sat down under the tree with oliver and stared at the crescent light on hir arms.
suddenly wanting to weep.
that was hir, those were eyes, those were teeth--

looking at oliver and seeing the same intimately familiar motif tessellating over his arms and legs as well.
a single sentence, unsaid, felt as strongly and soundlessly as the eclipse itself,
"that is what being haunted looks like."

and as monday returned to normal, mason wearing that red blanket as a glorious cape, flying back into the joyous familiarity of daylight, I and a quiet shadow-colored daemon followed him up the stairs and wondered. remembered.
nothing would be the same, now.
life itself had just… shifted. the sun was in our mouth. the moon was in our blood, patterned across our skin. that sudden lessening of light, that transformation of the world into something other, something so familiar--
for an ephemeral eternity, infinitii had existed here.
ze never wanted it to leave.

I can't help but smile when I realize that, inside us now, it never will.