Afternoon on the Spanish Atlantic coast. She is a creature of blue, flawless days.

The sea close by breathes in slow intervals, just as she does in bed next to me. In that moment I have everything. I am Poseidon.

A soft sadness rises in me. I know I have to return to the bottom. I cling to her image as the waves pull me in, one by one.

A waft of her,

of salt and roses gets caught in my tangled seaside hair.

Boy 16 was in considerable trouble. Admittedly, this is not remarkable in itself — many people of all sorts and ages get in trouble rather regularly. But Boy 16 was in trouble for the first time in his life. The experience was very unfamiliar to him and, indeed, to nearly anyone he had ever known his entire life.

This is because his life was not strictly taking place here, on earth. Boy 16 lived above it. And he was not exactly a boy, not in the human sense at least. He belonged to a group of creatures known as The Light People. About the size of a large snowflake, their little bodies float in air just as humans float in water, allowing them to live high up in the sky. Their realm is the thick blanket of bright-white cotton-like clouds floating in the heavens just under the bellies of airplanes. Within it there is no form, just loose lines where the elements end and sentience begins, or something approximating it. If one looks attentively enough through the window of an aircraft flying at cruising altitude, the mountains and valleys etched in the white surface of the clouds become almost visible. This is the world of The Light People. It is nested between two layers of stars — those high above made by the chances of chemistry and physics, and those down below created by the humans to illuminate the night. It is a beautiful place to be, but nobody really paid much attention to beautiful things up there.

The Light People take everything they need from the sun and the rain — they need no food or drink. Their homes are made of the tiniest water droplets and shift shapes with the whims of the winds. Their landscape is a tall mountain in the morning and a flat steppe in the afternoon. Everything changes with such constancy that no one is really attached to anything. Very much unlike humans who are forever looking for something or someone to get attached to. There is only one law that remains fixed, and everyone must abide by. The Light People have to stay light if a painful and likely permanent fall to earth is to be avoided. And because they have no belongings and feed on sunshine and water vapour, the only thing to weigh them down is not a thing. It is their thoughts and feelings. Sadness in that land is to be avoided at all costs because it makes one heavy and being heavy means falling through the clouds down to the ground. It is for this reason that The Light People do not have music, photography, books, paintings, or dogs. In other words — nothing to stir emotions or leave permanent traces for others to discover and ponder over sentimentally, not even names — just numbers that produce no feelings and call no memories.

Boy 16 was in trouble because he could not help feeling sad. He was really missing his elder sister who disappeared years ago, likely because she got too heavy in her thoughts and fell through to the ground — it sometimes happened to those few who were not built for lightness. Their sibling love was the true kind — plain, unconditional, devoid of pretence. Their partnership was one of ample mutual understanding and shared revolt against a reality they both found difficult to inhabit in a similar way. For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, everything is there. And they talked, talked.

His feeling of solid, stony sadness and loss was not new but Boy 16 was usually very good at suppressing it, except lately. He was finding it very hard to stay light these past few days, and with the sunset that evening being particularly resplendent and moving, he was losing the fight against sadness. He was slowly giving in to the feeling and sinking deeper moment after moment. Then the feeling suddenly became overwhelming, tidal, as sadness always does if cultivated for long. He felt a tear forming. And then everything went black.

Boy 16 fell to earth. Pain and terror arresting his minuscule body and all its unfathomable wiring. The sea birds nearby hung above him, they wheeled, then disappeared.

He found himself in a busy, sprawling, and crowded city, as old as stones and cut in half by a trembling snake the colour of mud. The city’s name was London. But Boy 16 did not know that yet. Alone and frightened in a place that was freighting even for those who called it ‘home’, he felt heavier than ever. So heavy that every move of his limbs required all the strength he had. Being so small, people walking on the street did not notice him and he had to dash like crazy to avoid being stamped on or drowned in a droplet of the drizzle that was falling over the city streets that evening. He ran for a long time, desperately trying to hide from people, the rain, and the occasional unsolicited sniff from a curious rat — the only living creatures seemingly taking an interest in him. Eventually he found shelter and fell asleep with exhaustion.

He spent the next few weeks wandering the streets of the great city. His ability to navigate it getting sharper by the day, fear subsiding with the growing familiarity of his exile. Boy 16 observed that heavy feelings were very much a part of human reality too. The difference was, he thought, that humans were not afraid of sadness, or heaviness — there was nowhere to fall to, or at least so it seemed. People made music out of it, and pretty, even useful things, like jewellery and architecture. Some made a living out of their heavy feelings — mostly by pretending to be sad and someone else, for the entertainment of other humans in places they called ‘theatres’. Boy 16 soon became convinced that he could find his way back home by learning from humans how to be sad and remain light within. If he succeeded, he thought, he could become light enough again and rise home. And so, Boy 16 hatched a plan, and went about it with all the seriousness of someone with very heavy feelings.

Months went by in observation of how city humans dealt with their heavy feelings. But what he initially took to be a certain uncanny mastery, he discovered to be something else. Yes, people did put their feelings to good use, sometimes. But mostly, humans seemed to hoard sadness. Some were proud of it and drew all sorts of attention to their gloom. Others piled it quietly at home and pretended to feel differently when with other humans. At any rate, it was obvious that people did not know how to feel all there is to feel and remain light within. Not only were humans from the city not masters of their feelings — they were rarely aware of how sad they truly were. So Boy 16 left the city and went on travelling in search of humans who could live lightly with the emotions the universe has to offer.

In the country he found different humans indeed. People were generally older and seemed to live slower, more thoughtful lives. And talked to animals a lot, which seemed dimly relevant.

Their homes were big and crammed full of objects from times past when their grandparents, parents and children used to inhabit the same house. A melancholy house, deceiving, like a church where, amid the serenity, something is false, the candles are electric.

Stringless violins, old dresses, smudged photographs, milk teeth and strands of hair in small cardboard boxes, hidden in bigger cardboard boxes. Usually piled in attics, basements, garages, and disused barns. Boy 16 thought this a rather sad way to live and hoped that perhaps it is these people who could show him how to live a light life. Any other living thing, he thought, would simply break down and cry incessantly if surrounded by so much that just isn’t here anymore. More time went by in careful observation that yielded nothing. Eventually, Boy 16 concluded that these humans were indeed more conscious of their sadness. So conscious that they depended on it, like a purpose or identity. They were clinging to sadness like to a blanket in a cold night.

Just as it was all beginning to look hopeless, Boy 16 was strolling down a street in the village when he accidentally witnessed a group of humans walking out of a warmly lit room full of burning candles and smelling of a small forest fire burning next to a spice shop. In the following days, Boy 16 discovered Buddhism, which was apparently what humans used to help them feel every emotion there is but remain light inside. Unfortunately, the local version of it was not as good as the real thing and the real thing, he learned, was very, very long way away, high up in some mountains.

And so, Boy 16 set off again, relying on nothing but the winds to get there.

It took him years, but he got there in the end. This time it all looked right — the humans living in this big house with beautiful gardens were all hairless and dressed in the same loosely fitting garments. They did not seem to be as vain as the humans he first encountered in the city and spent a very long time sitting motionless with their eyes closed. They were called monks and their house — a monastery. After only a day, Boy 16 was convinced that these people have what it takes. He was going to learn from them, master his feelings and become light again. Light enough to rise again to his home in the clouds.

Over the next weeks he learned what meditation was — the technique monks employed to control what they feel and stop their minds from going to places that are not here and now. Soon he was so good at it that he could do it for hours on end (which was important according to the bald humans). And true enough, after a while Boy 16 felt in a new way. He still got sad at times, remembered, and missed his sister, his home too, but differently. The way someone misses someone else just for a day, with clarity and promise. Filled with hope, Boy 16 dedicated all his time to get very good at this Buddhism thing.

Two more years passed. With nothing but mountain forest green around, Boy 16 sat crossed legged on a blade of grass in the garden. It was the day he had decided to go home. A crisp spring day, the light of which felt new and unused. He felt confident that he now knew how to control his feelings and make himself light enough to go home. It was a matter of uninterrupted focus through meditation. Boy 16 took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and slowly released the few air molecules he had in his tiny chest in a long, controlled exhale.

It did not work. He kept at it for hours, but it was only getting worse. Fear raised again in him like a curtain of steam, liquifying into cold despair somewhere towards the top of the void opening within him. What now? Was that it? Was he simply incapable of being like the others, like his fellow beings who managed to get on with their lives? It seemed so.

Exhausted and utterly crushed, Boy 16 went to sleep that night having given up all hope. The next day he woke up at home.

I fear for what would become of us.

I remember the fresh early days, the great pain of the beginning. Human birth is exceptionally traumatic for infants, and Harry’s was no exception. It’s like being scooped out of bed at three in the morning by an excavator and laid down in the middle of a fully packed stadium hosting the Pain Olympics, with the floodlights on. But the physical is only part of the suffering. The soul is also born then, just a moment after the body, with a large, old quantum pop of virtual particles. It is terribly confusing to come from nothing. I was still a little stunned when I laid eyes on my Harry, a morning in summer. The green trees lashing one another outside. A strong boy, wriggling like an eel in the rubber-gloved doctor’s hands. Crying hard, his brand-new violet eyes straining in the direction where I, Harry’s Soul, had just popped into existence.

Blood and quantum fluctuations is what everything is made of.

But this was a long time ago. Now, I am sitting here in adult Harry’s bedroom, reminiscing, watching him sleep uneasily. Still handsome, with certain faintly female characteristics, a hint of weariness in his features, caring. Completely unsuspicious, he is a man who would pass any interview. Always wearing his wristwatch in bed. His wife does not like it, but accepts it now. She is good to him. Their life is good to him. With its Egyptian cotton linen, the small Oriental rug on Harry’s side of the bed, which, though worn , still provides itchy warmth for his feet first thing every morning.

It lacks nothing, this life. Their bedroom is spacious, with a view of the river and waist-high windows.It is late and the city is approaching peak stillness, few lights are on in apartment buildings nearby. The silence is both oppressive and purging, it makes important things audible. The beautiful architectural house on the other side of the street reflecting the soft streetlights, dark and monolithic in its bulging concrete walls and sharp angles. Decorations on balconies nearby are already anticipating Christmas with impatient and efficient L-E-D light. My soft sentimental inclinations get the better of me and I drift in time, again, wondering how we got here. The soul knows much less than people give it credit for.

Harry’s childhood is a happy memory, with a bruise. Long days of ochre light and sticky summer boredom in the country, catching lizards along the river in the hot afternoons, first kisses in the evenings. All the books about pirates and Indians we could lay hands on, and an odd urge to write overly sentimental poetry every now and then. The shelves in our bedroom were bent beneath books about adventure. The richness of our life then like homemade butter. We felt terrific — we even had a dog. But then — a punch to our little face. The divorce of our parents was hard on Harry and hovered above our little life like a Hindenburg for many years. I still don’t quite understand why. It is traumatic by definition, of course, but they both loved him — us. They cared. Even if we lived with our mother, we spent a lot of time with our father too, whole summers by the sea. Our birthdays and even Christmases were spent together as a family until we were twelve or so. Perhaps it was this false glimpse of the other life still possible — that of families who always dined together. Perhaps it was our Mother, who could not forgive a bird for singing too loud. Or our Father, whose inclinations to discuss feelings of any magnitude larger than wanting a breakfast were minimalistic at best. At any rate, we wrote many letters to Santa asking him to get our parents back together, encouraged by Grandmother, a woman pathologically unsuccessful in matters of romantic love.

But suffering is good for the soul, especially the kind fuelled by love. I had a great time during the decade Harry spent chasing after that difficult woman who, overall, had the same effect on him as interstellar space on candlelight. She offered my Harry many and vast new horizons, some not altogether meaningless, but invariably cold and empty in the end. It was instant invasion and lordship that relationship. He coped then largely by reading copious amounts of books of increasing quality and indulging in an impressive variety of so-called human vice. He tried the good stuff too — meditation, philosophy, charity even. This naturally strengthened my complexion, and we grew very close during the time of his twenties. I helped him make good friends and recognise real love. Humans only dimly suspect it, but it is us, their souls, that initiate, support and preserve meaningful relationships. Like dogs smelling each other’s derrières, but more consequential, as it were. Humans talk about connecting with one another, but it is just souls embracing other souls. There is this design flaw, however, which is a little problematic at times: a soul cannot see or talk with another soul. We can only dimly sense and mix with one another, like great ocean currents trading in salinity.

In Harry’s 30s, a lot of developments came one after the other: a career, a house, our marriage, the use of automobiles and motorcycles, credit cards, stock options. With all the activity and everything, I hardly had time for myself. This is when things between us began to wilt. Our job, for example, was not altogether without purpose, but it was never meant to take up so much space in our life. At the start of his career, Harry used to mock those he deemed paid too much attention to work — unless, of course, it was something related to the arts. Harry has some artistic talent and an acute sense for it, but he has always lacked the courage to do anything about it. He despises business professionals and antagonises the artistic classes. But look at him now dreaming about important meetings on Monday. He is a strange, almost original mix my Harry.

Our work has become an intolerably big part of our life now. The long days, the infinite video calls. And the buying of things to make it all stick together. To assemble life out of these discrete pieces of living. Beautiful things, for he has taste, but things nonetheless: houses, cars, watches, sofas, trousers. More sofas and more watches. It never ends with him. These days he opens a book to read only to put it down minutes later, to check today’s movements of the stock market. And the communication, the incessant torrent of pointless communication is sheer terror. Our phone is buzzing at all hours of the day with meaningless words. ‘Any plans this weekend?’ ‘No, nothing much, just driving to see Gary’s mother. You’? ‘I just want rest to be honest, been tough few weeks at work.’ ‘We should do something together soon though!’ ‘Heart’ ‘Heart’. Good heavens! Harry knows very well that a life that is a package — an assemblage of parts — can also be easily disassembled. This scares him but he thinks there is little he can do now. Which, of course, is a poor excuse but humans love rationalising and explaining away their weaknesses only to do very little about them, with pride. Monsters with ideas.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound too flame-eyed and low-voiced, but I have come to understand that humans love false choices. This thing or that thing. Have more or, heaven forbid, be more. Enlightened life alone out in the sticks or subsumed in society and a cog, with a shopping list. No time or space for opposing ideas, for life’s paradoxical endeavour, no. And, by Jove, no tolerance for emptiness, for a little space where I can work in peace on the important stuff that make You human, Harry. So pathologically scared of emptiness! Which is funny because humans are mostly made of empty space. But not in the head, no. There the stuff gets dense. The sacred space you increasingly took away from me is what got us here. Why couldn’t you leave me just a little space Harry? It is not exactly twenty-one grams, but it isn’t that much more really. To be good is to leave out some space and silence, but you never understood that. You drove me to leave with your crammed life and false choices. I cannot take the squeeze anymore. And am frightened. But I do love you still. I love our body and am awfully proud of it even in our mid-thirties. I wonder what would happen to you, what would become of it. A man without a soul. The anguish of it, the suffering of those who love you. But it is time we face the inevitable and find a solution, Harry. For you, it is a soulless life I am afraid, for me — joining the party above a bit earlier than planned. Plenty of empty space there for a soul to run amok. I am assuming that all that is left now is to rise above it, quite literally, and float upwards until I start seeing the signs… It is an instinct for us but, honestly, we do not know much more than humans suspect about the whole heaven business. So, this is it then, it is time to go. Good-bye dear Harry!

I rise, out of the room and building, high above the black city. It is quiet and still. The trees are naked. The windows of buildings far below me are chilled. Spaciousness, at long last. The world is vast here, vast and unmoving. My wings creak like an old horse saddle and I am happy, sad, happy and light. The exciting promise of what comes next is gleaming in my mind. Up in the distance ahead there is movement. It shakes me out of my meditative state. I strain to see better. There are spots of pale light, hardly distinguishable in the surrounding darkens, moving deftly akin to a giant flock of sparrows and forming one-way traffic lanes in the sky. I see about a dozen of those lanes stretching far out into the distance where the horizon ends. I realise these are souls going home. I wonder whether something terrible might have happened, a mass death event! An electric terror grips me for an instant but no, it cannot be, they are not glowing, none of them. Souls always glow a ghostly white, unsurprisingly, when they leave their host bodies after death, that much I know is true about the final process. So, I potter on confused for a few more moments until I suddenly get it, and it makes me freeze altogether. These souls, tens of thousands of them, or more, are all leaving on their own will, as I did only minutes earlier. Which means… it must be then! All those souls have left their humans for some serious reason or another. For souls do not leave without a good reason, like mothers. All those humans without souls in this city which was nasty enough… And my Harry left alone in it all! Wait a minute. Can I come down again, or not? What are the rules? Why are the birds singing so high up?

Harry felt something then, a crack, a fissure. In his sleep, he had the dim sense of something impending and unbearable. His eyes open slightly, like an animal’s.

Or is it just grim,
a warm thick scream,
to weave
your
threads of
thought
together
as she boils the air
around you
on a sincere
vivacious whim

Little wing, little wing
do you smell like
a man’s
breadth
– words wedded in a set
to her
perfect
earlobe
– glistening with night desire,
notes of drink,
and a rolled cigarette

Or, does she get it slowly
– it’s a vein attempt
for
(temporalisation) of space
and
(spatialisation) of time
– nihilistic, yet sense
of touch
that leaves,
and leaves you both
deeply and truly lonely

where no am is ever as was

I’ve always written for love, often to your mother;
She entered my heart saying “Yes, that’s right”,
after which our separating selves became museums
filled with skillfully stuffed memories coming alive at night

(Then a lot of things happened)

Your mother, whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh wear space on and his mind take off time;
Child, read me gently after many a summer,
no heroes or monsters — that is the soul of things sublime

I now use my words to dance with your future thoughts,
to paint you a portrait of all the light days
when your smiling hazel eyes would wake me
besides your mother’s porcelain embrace

Of the mornings like anesthesia leaving the blood;
with your ringing laughter soothing old heartache
and her sleepy love haptic on my early sticky skin;
we’re all so lightly in the huge bed, barely awake

Later your happiness would carry the afternoon
on its soft spry childhood shoulders;
I carry you on mine alongside the canal and the stars
Your little mouth calls me names heavy like boulders

(I have no words for that leap in my chest)

Later still, the day is baked into another bone
that has no other life in my body but your beauty;
We all have a bedtime story
yours are made of stardust and fairy chalk

(Mines — of us, and all the light days we had)

Each red flash
Ebbs in memories
And flows into images,
As my train is building a field
Around you.
(Fragile days of velvet,
The colour of green bottles.)
Where I find the oppressive selves
I gave to you
Beyond sorrow’s own joys
And hope’s very fears.

I catch a glimpse of you now -
(Smiling,
Sitting
Singularly
Naked)
Water’s running down
Your feline cheekbones
Into the little valleys of flesh,
At the base of the avian neck.
How exquisite,
I almost hear your moans.

And that sound of the razor you held -
(Softly
Scratching
Sacred
Sins)
Is maddening.
I can taste
Your skin with mine now,
Its pores dilate
Like pupils
In sweet anticipation

Of your million layers,
(Half — human
Half — not)
Reacting with my personal chemical chaos
Where one pleasure
Is melding into another pain.
A sensation ever there
In that spot waiting
As I breathe you in my bones
In an expression
(Of what you call obsession).