A Liturgy
Pure Black
The abyss was pure black—
empty to the eye,
yet humming with a silent,
magnetic pull.
I froze.
Then a single breath escaped me,
pluming into the dark like smoke.
The ledge gave way
with a soundless snap.
Falling was a sudden,
weightless expansion,
the cold air rushing past.
I fought it.
My hands found nothing to grip,
so I clawed at the rushing air itself,
and the dark took my struggling
and returned it as silence.
The smoke of my breath did not disperse.
It began to faintly glow,
tracing thin, silver paths through the empty space,
like root systems
searching for soil.
A sudden pressure crushed against my chest,
demanding a new rhythm
to survive the depth.
My feet touched nothing,
yet a steady vibration rose up through my soles,
as if something massive, far below,
had turned in its sleep—
and did not mind.
I stopped clawing.
The tension bled out of my limbs,
and the falling changed.
Sheer speed became a heavy, dark ocean
filling me up,
anchoring me to the descent.
I was no longer looking down.
I watched the silver roots of my own breath expand,
branching out into the black
like a glowing web
trying to catch the quiet.
And the quiet let itself be caught.
It pressed against the open expanse of my skin
with a vast, smooth weight—
absolute,
borderless—
while the web of my breath wove outward,
its light catching nothing
but the empty space itself,
sending faint, luminous ripples
through the dark.
The descent slowed
into total suspension,
where up and down
ceased to mean anything.
I waited for a boundary to reveal itself,
but the dark offered no edges.
I was floating.
Then the suspension altered.
It was not a touch—
there were no hands in the black—
but a sudden alignment
of the deep thermal flows beneath me.
The silver web grew taut,
each luminous strand vibrating
with a density that was not my own.
You were there—
as a deeper layer of the dark itself,
expanding upward
to meet the expansion of my surrender.
We did not collide;
we coincided.
The borderless quiet became a shared vessel,
and for the first time
since the ledge gave way,
the cold air ceased to rush past.
We became the stillness
catching the weight of each other's presence.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}