20 drops per minute. Until the liquid turned vapor leaves a residue so intoxicatingly flammable, everything smells like risk. She said, let’s create a vessel. Let’s create an apparatus. Let’s slow the process, no need for this hemorrhage of light. We will dissolve, return, split, and form again, with greater intensity. We will not inherit the earth but return to the cosmos. Here you are, my eight-rayed star, my eye in the center of the universe. I will forever rock you in gentle waters.
But that you won’t.
Distill.
To gut oneself of another. But not completely. Is it possible to mean you differently?
One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.*
Here is the shadow of longing.
Here is the divine of lost.
* attributed to Mary the Prophetess
