IntersezionArt en

Her face is mine, millennia older.
Those closed eyes watch me. Her hair is braided. Braided tentacles. I am afraid. She sings with her mouth closed. I feel my heart explode; it beats in time with hers. It does not stop.
I watch her cross the atrium, pass through the altar. It is an open mystery; her brow moves, it opens. I am trembling, but she is strong, beautiful, I am swept away.
She comes closer.
The altar is air for her, the ocean in the room. She is drinking it. I drink the ocean. I drink her.
She allows herself to be touched. The octopus. Gleaming tentacles.

A procession of creatures moves. Ritual. They bring gifts to the mother. She grabs them with her tentacles: black corals, empty pearls, eyes. Her throne is stone. She does not speak. She does not need to. She lets me understand; everything she must convey passes through the water. Cold. Warm.
“Are you, my son, able to drink what I offer you? A breath?”
I wait, immersed.
A buoyant fusion.
I catch it.
She places her hand on my forehead and presses her skin. She leaves her tentacles imprinted on me; now I am part of her. Her tattoo burns. The heart throbs. It throbs in time with hers. It does not stop.

They whispered that she had been waiting. I arrive and open my small box. I draw on the ground with chalk; I do not have much to do — one well-copied symbol from my papers will do. I always carry them. When I trace the first stroke I shiver; it runs from my hand up to my neck. My hair stiffens, my eyes lose focus. I continue. I pass the chalk over the stone again to form small sickles, my movements screech, I steady my wrist with the other hand so I do not make a mistake. There are few marks to make, but I would be shaken if I missed the first try.
I finish.
The cave opens in a spiral; I hear the lapping of water a few meters from the entrance, splashes hit me, the smell of salt, the smell of seaweed, the rot rising from the dark. The spiral walls breathe, they carry away the air, veins, arteries waiting to pulse.
I mark with chalk and hear an echo return. I place a hand on the ground where I drew and my lips move on their own. I recite the formula I learned by heart. The lullaby that accompanied my childhood evenings, the slow falling asleep to the same chant. Here I use it on purpose and I feel the arteries of the walls respond to me. I feel it.

Eyes see in the dark; an incalculable time may have passed or only a single second. My lips still whisper the lullaby, sculpting whispers. Whispers. Arteries and whispers.
My legs move, they advance. My tongue tastes salt, my feet sink into the slime. Decaying seaweed. Thin air. Arms and legs cold; my jacket does not shelter (I have no shelter).
Sounds from the depths, a hint of light. Pupils dilate. I am before a vast chamber, a fluorescence that casts no shadows. There are shapes that shift. In the center a large stone strikes me like an altar. I see inscriptions. One symbol is mine.

The spirals fold upon themselves, false eyes that look inward. The arteries have come back to life. The fluorescence they emit makes them at times transparent, a pulsing. My legs move on their own, drawing me to the altar, and it is as if it appears for the first time, as if it had emerged. Strange to say, why I had not noticed it before. Why my being failed, attention lost in non-details, in that which hardly matters, the surroundings distracted me.
Now she is here in front of me, curled up, the figure motionless. Half woman, half abyss. Her face is in mine, a thousand years older.
Connection.
Her immobility connects.

Words come from nowhere, sustenance in the memory of the water. New marks appear on her skin, they move, but there is one that never changes. Mine. The one I drew on the ground to come here.
Words come, a thousand thoughts fold in and I feel the sea above me. I lift my gaze for a moment, but I see nothing. The lapping is distant, the smell less intense, the air more breathable. Before this creature it seems creation itself breaks, it carries away the ugly and the evil and lets something different enter, which I do not grasp. Indistinct. Unknown the slow heartbeat of the abyss; I had imagined it suffocating, I was wrong. On my skin her marks move. My no.

The creature on the altar moves; her chest has begun to rise with a slow rhythm, a tide that rises and repeats, internal with slow convulsions; the tentacles in her head stir gently, the marks on her body grow clearer and press into the skin, my coupling, absorbed into the womb, I see it take the shape of a placenta; it glows for a moment and then fades. Nails scrape the stone, hands stiffen. A fluid runs from the skin, oil and water, as if purging; when the liquids touch the ground, the sky gleams, so it seems to me — for a moment I saw the sky, then nothing more. The tentacles interlace. Their awakening makes a sound that gives me chills.

The creature moves, she rises and towers over me; even if she were not standing on the altar she would be enormous. Her body is divine perfection, water surrounds and protects her.
How illicit to approach such divinity, how wrong I have been to hold back. I could have died from so much beauty, for I, alone here admiring her, ache. Not sharing so much love for the abyss is an outrage to life itself.
What hypocrisy of mine. Do I want nothing from her? If not to breathe what she breathes, to feel as she feels, to become ocean as she has been until now? I would actually ask the abyss. Hypocrite that I am. My only desire is that she forgive me.