My Happy Death (The Hidden Spring) Part II

We carry within us the miracle of Christ's transfigured--in that instant our eyes locked and our minds entwined, I felt a new beginning well up inside. Somehow the old book had suddenly ended and the first sentence in the book of Life had been set down for all time. It was like absorbing whole histories of forgotten people on the sudden brush with a relic from their buried civilization--languages not spoken for a millennia course through the mind as one sees through thousands of long-dead eyes. Except that I was not looking upon the distant past but my own future. How many times has the "love at first sight" speech been rolled out, but I am here to testify, my hand on the holy stream, that it is true--all of it. I looked into her eyes and saw the face of my wife.

And all of this is made all the more miraculous by the fact that I had already stood on the edge of the cliff and looked over into the void. I had relinquished all hope and given myself up (is that not the key?)--a storm-tossed vessel lost on the seas.

But rolling back over the continent, I kept getting the unconscious feeling that I was headed toward something inexplicably important. As if somehow, I was passing through the mirror of time. And the whole way back, my consciousness continually pierced by Cold Roses--the thorns of truth cutting through the world's illusion; the storms of Lincoln, Nebraska--sight-blinding rain and semi-rolling winds: traffic pulled over as the fury of the storm played out over the face of the Great Plains, making me feel like some kind of Midwestern Odysseus. Back over the highway of dreams covering the schooner's rills, back home to meet my one true love for the first time. 2,500 miles, and at the end of it all, your starlight eyes and moonlit smile--my Jill.