The World Tree
It was life.
It stood in the light, glimmering as spangled dew on a cobweb, and I heard it and felt it and smelt it and saw it. I fell into the light, into it, and felt it snatch me up and twist me and twirl me in its vivid, messy limbs, and I was drenched in it, pleasure and pain and joy and sadness.
I was life.
I saw the world; I saw the people of the world; I saw the lives of the people of the world, and I was beautiful. I saw a child dancing at the end of a rainbow. I heard sorrow sweeping the depths of dank dark cellars. I felt the numbness, the lack of any feeling, of grief; vast and all-encompassing, swathing me in its empty embrace. Fresh-baked bread in the morning, honeysuckle and gorse on the wind, the dreadful stabbing pain of hunger, the cry of the eagle in the light of the evening, the awful angry sorrow of the row of the lovers, the aching girl teetering on the very edge of a bridge over raging traffic. It was life, it was love, it was grief, it was sorrow. It was the world. I was the world. Marietta Edgar Sobelia was gone, there was only the world, everything flowing through me, burning, burning, millions of hopes and dreams and gripes and grumbles and there were tears flowing through me I was crying, sobbing, I was everything and everything was me, conjoined in perfect equipoise, burning, burning, burning, ten billion souls and I.
I awoke, gasping, and cried out, for there was only me and my thoughts and my self, and nobody else, nothing else. I was alone again, cut off from the world, a mote of dust in the infinity of space. One voice, one mind, one sense of perception, it was so empty. So lonely. So… dull. I noticed I was crying, great heaving sobs.
“No,” I cried, “I want to go back, go back!”
But there was only the blank grey walls and the oppressive, angry, thunderous silence.
I had been life, I had been everything, I had been the world, and now I was nobody and nothing. Merely Marietta Edgar Sobelia.
Go back