Touch

The night moves in swiftly.  Without pausing or contemplating, she descends upon them, her children.  Deliberate as a wolf upon its kill, she seizes the cities of men and pours herself upon them.  They are her children, for the pretentious beasts rose out of the shadows to claim fire and iron as the Sigil of their name. Though they deny her now, none can escape her.  She takes them all, and in the moments of their finest calm, when they have ceased to struggle against her, she wraps them in her cloak and holds them against her breast.

She loves us.  Though we burn her flesh with our beacons of the day.  Though we worship the puny Sun and his cowardly silver servant.  Though we pray against her.  Though we quake in fear before her.  Though we would push her back with all the magic and all the secrets of the false light in all our books.  Though we would banish her from our homes.  Still, she fills our lives.

Even the sun must rest.

I have always felt the night moving over me.  The terror I felt in bed each night with covers pulled tightly about my neck, their edges clamped between my sides and the bed, it was always mixed with a certain form of ecstasy.  Perhaps I love the night because I know that one day she will drive the last spark of light out of me and take me back into her midnight womb.  I am her child.  All my days worshiping the God of the light could not quench that lust for darkness from the center of my heart.  All my oaths, all my rage, all my tears, all my fervor, it could not lift her finger that has traced circles upon my soul since the day that she surrendered me to the world of the evening.

What it has taken me years to understand, I have always known.  There is no evil in the night.  Evil is a fable concocted by men who fear death above all things.  Sin was a tale devised to make all men fear the night as the cowards do.  In the palm of the evening there is no righteousness and there is no wickedness.  In the darkness, all things may only be as they are.  There are no games to play, no shadows, no tricks of the light.  No, in the darkness, things are only as they are, and you know this because the touch of your fingers cannot be deceived.

For eons of time, we have trusted our primal senses.  First, touch.  We knew the edge between our bodies and the darkness first when we were but worms writhing in the night.  Even then, we used this, the testament of truth, the tactile judge.  We knew how things were because we felt them against our very bodies.  No lies could pass beneath this, the most basic of our instruments.  No, this, the skin, the flesh, the touch, it requires us to approach all things, to know them with our very matter before we can pass judgment.  And, in the touch, there is no lie.  There only is that which is.  Lies are a folly to the fingers.

Touch a liar, and watch him squirm.  Despite the greatest cunning of our cerebral cortex, we all know.  Beneath a feeling hand, lies are brushed away like a snowy feather.  Somewhere, beneath the coils of our new brilliance, there is a little piece of that first worm that knows truth is known beneath an outstretched finger.  Here, in our first and most carnal meeting with the world, we all know all there is to be known.  This power, the finger that caresses the truth, even the very gods fear it.  Why else would our father the serpent tell our mother to first touch the fruit.  The wiliest tricks of YWEH could not persist beneath the Woman's finger.