Glass Half

It was the first term of Obama, under a frigid sunlight, maybe those doldrum times where March stagnated with slush half frozen and half-thawed beneath unseasonable shoes and craggled tires. I pulled up to the house under pleasant circumstances, situated as it was in plot once cleared for farming, now left to overgrow with waving grass and the slow sprinkling of rust flecking off abandoned tools. The house, wood, was the sort of building that only ever enlivened as it decayed, slumping down comfortable-like to become more of a hobbit hole as the elements heaped dirt and time upon it, giving it the air of an old man well deserving of rest, dispensing poetic words from a heap of blankets and sweaters.

In the living room, a couch looked the same, the figure in it slumped like a smoothed rock in cloud-like pillows. Upon it - a Windows Vista laptop, wireless mouse resting on the cushion under her hand, rapidly moving across the screen. Two Internet Explorer windows were open, each covering about three-quarters of the screen, one on Facebook’s home page and the other on Bejeweled. Noises glittered around over the sound of crushing and matching atop strangely bland images of distant planets.

Beneath the television was a Wii, all bright, with Wii Play, Sports, and Resort attached. Above it, the flatscreen was playing Gaga’s cavorting ritual-like, almost an invitation to her world. The room, white emptiness surrounding power condensed to tiny crystalline gems, a single chandelier in an airline hanger, gold draped from her body, sequin dusted over her skin as she glided inhuman-like in a world between worlds. Gaga was inviting us. I watched on the other side of the couch, wondering where this was the Black or White Lodge - or if that distinction was even real outside the old fashioned morality plays our older siblings grew up on.

Dinner was being put together in the kitchen as the couch was left to my devices. Distant-aunt was busy showing off her petty wins from the Indian casino, passing out little electronic games from her trip through Walmart, her livelihood of crumpled papers all along the passenger side of her Lincoln Town Car. His-sister was at the other side of the counter, papers pushed aside to make room for strange antiques and gadgets found at auction from a nearby desperate liquidation. I ignored the noise and the orange of burning secular candles, to push the cushions aside, hands held together like an Olympic diver, spreading a passage for myself between the cushions, into a dark. The fit was tight, warm and smothering as I progressed deeper, though I never felt stuck. I didn’t notice when the entrance sealed up behind me, all of that covered up with an unconscious knowledge that there was no point in even holding onto a thought of coming back the way I came.

A time - it felt long and I can’t say beyond that - later, I was in darkness, floating amidst the twilight zone spectacles of bioluminescent predators, occult eels and jellyfish, forbidden megafauna, my arms and legs flailing all about myself in dense water. I was propped up by it, suspended. This couldn’t be the ocean, I was neither freezing nor sinking nor crushed, a womblike floating.

Despite this, it was anything but. There were no wombtones to be found amidst the darkness, it was all lunar blue and shadow of nothing, if this darkness was feminine at all, it was in the infertile, witchy sort, the kind girls mature into, not the kind children are beget from.

I’m brought back to life, opening my eyes blearily. I’m wrapped in tundra clothing, of the kind that a human wears until it becomes an extension of their being, turning them into a hulking giant of the Far North. Scattered through the blue interior of the shelter are ancient bones from undersea demigods, the whales we worship, on whose rough skeletons we acquire rocks where myths are glyphed in languages impossible.

I learned to write when they taught me to read the stars. Out here, we don’t need fire. The ice and us had an understanding, as we walked on through lights and countless miles, that by the time we reached our stillness, it treated us like stones. We passed around pipes that put us to deep dreaming sleep, atop the ice sheet, looking upwards to Heaven, an abyss of magic below and the runic roadmap of the celestial firmament above.

When I returned to America, I did it Southerly, from Alaska’s trashiest hideaways - I pretended I was born there - down, down, through the darkest shadows of truck stops and dead hooker motels along the detour roads a few miles inland from the pacific coast. I dodged every major city as I picked up money I didn’t know I had. I made it to LA and emerged into a party, drink in hand, materializing out of a dark corner of a plastic-cum-marble Mulholland manor.

I was ascending a staircase. The stars were in my hand, every constellation seen from the tundra rendered miniature and blown up by the optical illusions of the crystal that vibrated between my delicate palm. The building was all white, lit perfectly, nothing but open, bright, and these little raindrop gemstones of magic above and upon. I was here for the coronation. In a grand white room, a woman we had never met came to us, knelt before an empty throne. The witch crowned her with two stretched palms, clothing her naked body in gold. The woman took the throne and we all circled, vulturous, the courtiers who elected ourselves. Our new queen looked out into the empty white between the throng of bodies we made around her. Our queen looked out into the empty white between the gold and crystal. We clapped. Our suits and dresses, black, made our queen recognize the situation at hand. Our queen gently had her eyes closed with two heavy coins. Our queen dreamed a dreamful sleep and we all took up harps in her name, to play our part.