Reflected Bits of Light

Spring 2010 Vol. 20, No. 1 Special Edition: Psychedelics, Death and Dying

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Willow is an English major at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I shook the moon with my fingers as the sky chuckled beneath me. When I lifted my hand from the river water, the ridges of cream against black fluttered back to its whole – the perfect circle that rests on the cusp of dishevelment in puddles and rivers and seas across the world. I feel the stirred river blossom into drops off my fingertips as I rearrange the molecules of night air, just passing through. I imagine what the passage of death must be – perhaps something like a spontaneous night walk; or maybe, one’s life could be the quivering pallor of a reflected moon – only momentarily disturbed before becoming whole again – as though we’re all reflected bits of light, and life is an ephemeral illumination of one another for introducing color to all the dark places, until everything is light …