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SIGIL
KALLUM: SIX MONTHS AGO
Media vita in morte sumus.
In the midst of life we are in death.
The Latin antiphon composed by Notker was conceived by the Benedictine monk amid a chasm, where the erection of a bridge over a yawning abyss stirred his soul in such a way, the product of which was his immortalized art born the same year he died.
The chorus of the hymn became a medieval battle cry as it branched out beyond its Catholic roots. It became more than a philosophical question, Notker’s vision evoked to move us in its melancholic embrace through every new rendition.
His moment of enlightenment, a voice through the ages.
As for me, standing at the precipice of my abyss, my moment feels like a heart attack.
The muscle squeezed in a ruthless, unforgiving vise. Breath hung on a searing ache that sets my damned soul aflame. Arteries constricting. Pulse slamming vein walls. A slice of white-hot pain through the sternum.
A pain so euphoric I’m nearly brought to my knees.
But I’m not dying.
I’m being brought to life.
The moment I see her, I’m strangled by melancholy steeped in honeysuckle and clove. I’m ensnared by the Grim Reaper’s clutch while angels intone the heavenly chorus, my acute existential crisis all but expelled from the bowels of despair.
It’s impossible to describe something so ineffable.
For the desensitized, to feel alive, we perpetually balance on the brink of death. That dare to take a step off the edge an electric chord zipping through our veins, the taunt whispered in our ears and prickling our skin with the challenge.
Yet it’s only ever a weak simulation of what lies just beyond our reach.
Then without warning,shecrashes into me—this exquisitely beautiful creature—and I’m not simply inspired to take a step, I leap right off the edge.
She’s the mirror flame of my own, yet it’s her fire that makes me feel.
Bringing my hand to my chest, I touch the mark carved into my pectoral as it flares with renewed heat, the rough edges of the sigil felt beneath the fabric of my shirt.
Because we harbor even a kernel of the infinite within us, we are painfully aware of our limitation, of the absence of divinity. We are temporary. This is our great existential wound. By slicing my flesh, I have merely scraped mine open to expose where she has always belonged.
A bruised night hangs over the campus, and I move from under the shelter of the eaves. I am suddenly symptomatic, made acutely aware of my gaping hole, my torn flesh, of my missing half rend from my being.
I summoned her. I brought her here. I follow her now, tethered to her like an echo of her movements, a shadow stalking her like a demon across the university grounds.
As if she senses me, she looks around warily. I only hang back for a moment—but that’s all it takes, one short moment in time to forever alter our course.
The attack happens suddenly, barely giving me time to identify the wrath singeing my insides before the altercation has escalated.
She’s dragged to the asphalt. Wellington hovers on top of her and his filthy hands wrap her neck. And a single thought invades my mind, that I’m going to end him.Brutally.
As if reflected in a dark mirror, this thought instantly manifests when she sinks her thumbs into the sockets of his eyes. He belts out a drunken wail, allowing her to escape and seize the discarded tool.
Her mounting fury snaps like a crack of thunder, and I’m grounded where I stand, entranced, enamored, a lightning rod inviting her strike. As she rises to face her attacker, the soft white light of the moon highlights her beautiful features, the pale vein streaked through her hair.
A heartbeat suspends us, waiting for a solitary breath to unleash the torrent.
The pulse of a drum resounds from the depths, intensifying. Time stills, torturously slow.
