Quartz

  Self-transcendence came formlessly and by chance. I noted the exodus of my blood into the forest soil but was transfixed by the reality of departure. My face was in the shallows, but I felt the boundaries of outer darkness. Each memory held in my newly acquired mind slowly became lurid and took shape. I became feeling; an exposed nerve sequestered in the elements of spirit. Electric. Free. My new self wholly distilled into a single sense.
  
***
  My inaugural transfer set the foundation for powerful deeds. In a forest clearing, two monks were heard discussing the moment a demon, Legion, was cast from a demoniac into a grazing herd of swine. When the diviner, known as Jesus of Nazareth, cast Legion into the herd, they proceeded to rush over a steep cliff and fell to their deaths.
  
  Their conversation turned hostile and the apprentice took his teacher (my second body) by the throat and strangled him against the trunk of an ancient beech tree. Its root networks elucidated the student’s disgrace before his future ancestors.
  
***
  I rose from the forest floor and wandered, in delirium, from night to morning, in search of a distant place to start anew.
  
  That I stumbled into the densely populated, sprawling republic, whose market district outsized any village I’d frequented, after the night’s events, felt serendipitous. My survival was contingent on coin donated by careless housewives and wayward youths. To my surprise, the authorities paid me no attention. The province was so rife with motion, so pulsed with activity, that it served to distort the senses, and judgments, of its denizens. I went about, in this unclean manner, for what felt like weeks, until the first snow.
  
  That morning, I happened upon the region’s monastery. I made my way to the edifice and turned its corner. A woman, who I later learned was the monastery’s abbot, met me with a deep bow. After she’d risen, I noticed her shaven head only accented her stunning features. While knocking snow off my sandals, I noted candlelight gleaming off an array of hanging kitchenware.
  
  I was shaven, given a cot and, inexorably, became immersed in monastic life. We practiced day and night, only to do the same, in unison, one season after the next. The reactionary depths of corporeality soon crystallized into memory, losing shape. The alpha and omega dissolving like salt into the ocean.