jameswyper

My mind, and time, stopped. I stared at my left wrist as four perfect circles of blood welled up like beads on a chain from the cut. I walked myself into the bathroom, rinsed my wrist off, and found, in the mirror, the tiny sliver of glass in my sternum. I pulled the shard out and marveled at the little cut chiseled in my skin. Everything I saw was bright, especially the little shard. I held it up close, saw my blood on it, twirled it in my fingers and felt its edges, was amazed by how perfectly sharp and pointed it was.

I took the shard back to the kitchen and held it up in front of the broken window. I could see the sky and land refracted upside down in it as they are in a simple lens. I realized that the shard, a perfect little missile formed in the mathematically perfect chaos of a window breaking, encapsulated the world. As I looked more carefully, my mind still blessedly quiet, I saw in its shape a cat's eye, a wolf, a woman reclining, a crystal, a dagger, a lens, a sculpture and a diamond.

The glass shard become a talisman for me; in the days that followed I would reopen the little cut in my chest with it to enhance my new sharpness of feeling. Eventually, the scalpel-sharp tip broke off, and I swallowed the shard, to metabolize its meaning in a sense, and as a gesture of cleansing.

The story that followed, of my tumultuous process of awakening and of years spent metabolizing the experience, would be book-length so I won't tell it here. Suffice it to say, my closed heart was opened and my unconscious, destructive mind stopped by a beautiful explosion.

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