When you experience horrors, you are left only with confusion and amnesia. The air smelled beautiful, the sights you could comprehend are angelic. Then your head dunks under the water and hands pull you farther into the deep.

You will come up from the water. Covered in mud and wounds, and you will preach. The beauty, the beauty, the beauty of it all. You can only comprehend the beauty which you will either forget or revere as you writhe from the trauma down below.

What was it that I saw? What was it that I did? What force is responsible for the story I live?

Those coincidental moments, those feelings right before, that unnerving smile.

I spill myself onto the land, tearing apart my skin and bleeding into the soil underneath. I give myself up to the earth, to the mountains that weep, to the animals who cry. There is nothing I can trust more than Mother Nature herself. I have always bled for her.

I am kept bounded to the body. I return each day. It heals from its infection. An infection I no longer understand.

I used to see it as a beast deep inside my stomach. She used to whisper to me. She kept me skinny and scared. She looked for something outside to latch onto. The infection came from inside. I fed it, with love and attention. I fed it because I was curious.

"Kill me," I would say to her. "Kill me or make me better."

A predator. A coyote. A tiger. A sickness. She transformed, using whatever she wanted as her face. She latched onto the outside and came from within.

It grabbed at my feet. And gnawed.

Under the water I was blissful. The beauty, the pleasure, the love.
The horror.

It became inescapable, surrounded at all sides.

If not for her I wouldn't be free.

I can't explain, I can't describe, I can't make sense of what happened to me afterwards. The incomprehensible horror that couldn't kill me.