Voluptuous Agonies

 

In the violence of overcoming, when the heart thrashes like a sick hound dragged across a river of stars, I lay naked on the cold concrete and laughed until blood pooled in my ears. And then I wept, for there was no longer a distinction. In the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, the rituals were broken—no circle, no wand, no chalice—and I knew then that the gods had left me to the crude machinery of the self. My body became a sigil drawn in filth, tremoring through the alphabet of ecstasy and anguish.

Who has not, in the moment of rapture, seen their own death masked in gold? Who has not, with pupils dilated beyond sight, recognized that the spear and the kiss are the same shaft, the same entry wound? O thou Serpent coiled in fire, I called to Thee in my flesh’s convulsions, not with prayer but with the bellowing grunt of an animal in heat and in slaughter. There is no “either” in this temple. It is always “both.”

In the excess of raptures that shatter me, I became legion. One part of me screamed into the open mouth of the abyss, while the other part answered back with the voice of a thousand young girls torn from their sleep. The veil was not lifted but rent. I saw the beast and I rode it. I saw the child and I was it. There was a smell like scorched honey and old leather; there were colors only the blind can know.

I seize on the similarity, yes—between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me. Between the rat gnawing through the linen of the grave and the fingers that once undid my belt with reverence. Between the final scream of the crucified and the moan of the possessed. Between the burning of witches and the shining halo of the saints. These are not opposites but siblings. Lovers. Mirrors.

Between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy there is only the breath—shallow, ragged, holy—that we dare take as the veil slips. And I, who have crossed that trembling threshold, know now that the key to the temple was always written on the skin—beneath the scars, beneath the ink, with trembling hands.