What It Became

The Ecstasy Of

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire.
-St. Teresa of Avila

She wakes to the floating moan. At three in the morning she had been lying in bed, between the red sheets, beneath the white quilt, limbs and hair floating loose inside the watery black night, a book asleep on the pillow beside her. She hears the moan, wakes blind in the dark and waits for the shifting tilt of the real to return. She has been pack muling desire for so long now that for a moment, until it returns, she thinks the sound may have slipped from her own mouth to wake her. What had she been dreaming.

In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God.
St. Teresa of Avila

She holds her breath. The air moans again above her, soft but unboundaried, and travels through the dust that is trapped in that secret space between floors, between the neighbour’s suite above and her ceiling below, over eighty-year-old plaster and nails and joists still smelling of sawdust, and out into her room spilling spirit.

The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans.
St. Teresa of Avila

He’s all doe-eyed, the boy who lives above her. And when they talk about the things that neighbours talk about – like parking spaces and garbage pick ups, he stumbles on his words and looks anywhere but her face. Because she makes him nervous, she smiles more, though it’s lost on him; he’s not looking at her. And he licks his lips again.

The sounds from his suite funnel down the stairs and pool in her bedroom all day long, rising up at night over the edges of her sleep and waking her, have been waking her now, for weeks. She could mark off on the wall the journey to this rising moan like waterlines on a riverbank: here, when the girl first came to his place; here, with a small group of friends when she laughed so loudly and left so late; here, the first time alone; here, tonight, at three in the morning, and the climbing, unclothed little sound carving out a sacred hollow in the air and flowing down into her hall, her room, against her neck and in her hair. The moan and moan and the moan.

She could prophesize its future, thinks she understands these things, but for now she is only trapped below it. Were it his voice instead of the girl’s she would have snapped on the lights laughing, banged the pots and pans. Or had the girl cried like a banshee, knocked books off bedside tables, broken lamps, cracked bed frames that liquid moan would not drown her like it does, leave her with a mouth full of river bottom and fish nibbling at her ribs.

The sounds bodies only know before.

This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it -- even a considerable share.
St. Teresa of Avila

Once before, she had lived in an another apartment with paper-thin walls. Once, when she was wide-eyed, laughing in surprise at all the sweetness there. And though the neighbour always banged when the T.V was too loud, he was silent then as she laughed her way through every room, from bedroom to kitchen to couch. Now, in her bed, in the blind dark, she wants to gather up that gentle moan and hold it safe. All its concentrated sweating, hurtling toward morning and post-ecstasy light.

The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God.
St. Teresa of Avila

She has had visions. In the bedding aisle of a crowded store she has seen the folding back of her thick white quilt to cinnamon coloured sheets like the peeling of a fruit to a soft warm centre. Like a burst pod to a rich and pulpy heart. She had wanted cinnamon, but they only came in red. No angel aflame, or golden spear; no point of fire. Only red.

Modern ecstasy being what it is her vision comes as common as bed sheets, as romantic as animal love and sex in the barnyard, but it is, she thinks, all the same. All hunger and ache, all sweet secrets guzzled and bodies laid bare, to a turning, and the waking up.