86: I Am Here

Creative Expression: Found Short Story/Pem (fiction)

This post is in the format of a Found Short Story/Poem; the words in italics are words taken directly from the verse and/or purport. The words in standard font are my own words. 

CHAPTER 7, TEXT 9 

Alone on a Saturday night in the city, a woman sits upon her velvet couch with a book in her hands. She used to fold her palms on Saturday nights like these to talk to God, but the years of silence in return ate away at her palms and she stopped folding them. 

The silence has eaten away at her neck and shoulders and now her face and her tongue. The silence of her apartment squeezes her chest like a vice. Years of chatter with coworkers, years of business proposals with clients, years of laughter at sitcoms on Netflix.

But the silence keeps growing.

No one speaks to her. She speaks to no one. 

Tonight she stares into space. Tonight gravity pulls at her bones. Tonight - away from the subway, away from her office, away from her clients - raw yearning eats away at her gut. She is surrounded by people above, below, and on all sides, and yet she is alone, 

alone, 

alone.

Where are you? she asks into space. She hears a clock tick in the kitchen. 

The woman sips her tea. She flips open the book a man in the subway sold to her - The Bhagavad-gita As It Is.

She pushes the pages through her fingers, the pages flipping by in a cool whisper. She stops the page, somewhere in Chapter 7. 

I am the original fragrance of the earth, the text says. 

Like a whisper in her ear. 

Everything in the material world 

has a certain flavor 

or fragrance, 

as the flavor 

and fragrance 

in a flower, 

or in the earth, 

in water, 

in fire, 

in air.

The uncontaminated flavor,

the original flavor, 

which permeates everything, 

is Kṛṣṇa.

The woman tastes the tea that lingers on the roof of her mouth. Rose. Jasmine. Something else. 

Rose. 

Jasmine. 

I am

Fragrance

in a flower

The whispers fill the air around her like so many hummingbirds. The silence. The silence that had been gnawing at her body for so many years dissipates in the gusts of whispers from the book on her lap. 

I am 

here. 

I am the original flavor, the fragrance in a flower. 

I am here in your tea.  

I am the life of all that lives. 

I am here in your heart. 

Your pulse thrums in your veins, your throat. That is Me. 

I am here. 

The woman, tingling, closes the book, the palms of her hands closing around the front and back cover. She stares at her lap. She notes that her palms are folded, and the book lay between them.