For decades, my sweetheart stared straight ahead. Before him, always, stood an expanse. Even if his eyes weren’t weak, he would have stared through the hopeless blankness of the cosmos across innumerable light years, past dying stars and decaying time, and have his gaze forever land on the back of his own head. Staring outward brought him nothing. Brought us nothing. Brought the world nothing. Billions of pairs of eyes staring at the back of the heads which imprisoned them.

Last night, The Universe slipped Her tongues inside my sweetheart, turned his eyes around, and allowed him to see the beauty hidden inside himself. His screams of pain and indignation turned to gasps of ecstatic transcendence. He became the first man in the history of men to see who he truly was. Who we truly are. Who we can truly be.

My sweetheart regaled me with stories about the man I thought I knew. Sounds passed through his lips and suffused my skull; syllables and sentences and syntax and semantics; introspection that would have been impossible before Her intervention. Her gift. The Universe continued Her manipulations as he spoke. My sweetheart’s eyes drooled their assent and he enthralled me with his enthusiastic tales.

His descriptors grew complex and the words became punctuated by, then gradually incorporated into, thick, harmonic buzzing. It was obvious he’d reached a point in his discussion that was beyond my capacity to understand. The blood vessels traversing his inward-turned eyes throbbed and their optic nerves trembled. I imagined the sights he must be seeing, despite knowing, with a feeling of ever-increasing futility, that even my wildest, wide-eyed fantasy, if extrapolated to its fullest extent, would still terminate at the back of my head.

As if sensing my dejection, my sweetheart caressed my belly. His touch was no longer familiar. In Her wisdom, The Universe had reshaped my sweetheart’s hand and arm. Long and segmented and annelidic with soft, rubbery protuberances, I gasped with alarm as its bulbous tip split and revealed a sharp, chitinous tip. The rubbery bits began to vibrate and I felt my bones humming in tune. I stared in horror as the keen end slid from the bulb and entered my abdomen. Expecting an onslaught of agony, I screamed.

There was no pain. I should have known my sweetheart would never, ever hurt me.

I felt a system of roots spreading throughout the interior of my body. Rising higher, the system grew up my neck and into my head, feeling like ten thousand tongues tickling the inside of my face. A flicker of blurriness in my right eye confirmed my assumption and unspoken prayer: my sweetheart would share with me the gift The Universe had given him.

An intense sensation of suction and a loss of depth perception caused me to swoon forward, but my sweetheart’s grip on my body ensured I remained upright. My ears itched almost unbearably and I heard crackling and stretching sounds as the little roots reconfigured and augmented my anatomy. Moments later, I understood my sweetheart’s words. I understood my sweetheart’s buzzing. My right eye, its pupil devouring the iris as it glared inside the mind which fed it, fixed itself on the sights inside while my visual cortex struggled to correlate the images of the outside word and the multiverse within me.

My sweetheart buzzed, and I found myself buzzing back. We effortlessly shared ideas and concepts and experiences in cascades of autoharmonic exchanges; his perspective of solipsistic mind-gazing melding with my half-world, half-mind dichotomy to create something new. Something blissful.

The Universe, in Her endless beneficence and gentle guidance, has directed us to bring the world into our new relationship. This account of our transformation is designed to serve as an invitation.

See us. Look upon the newness of flesh qua flesh, mind qua mind. Know you no longer need to be content with staring into space – into blankness – with no hope of seeing the richness of existence. We are here to bring hope. If these words seem insignificant, see us. If these words seem ineffectual, see us.

We, for the first time, have seen us. Us as individuals – now us as one. The bleakness before our old eyes was an outward-facing abyss of loneliness and uncertainty. Now we see everything. We feel everything. And there is so much more to see. So much more to feel.

Please, see us. See us to feel us. See us to feel us to see one another and feel one another. Show us, and yourself, what you look like on the inside. And let the countless tongues of The Universe taste our union.

More.

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