The Big-Smalls

As a child I coined the term “The Big-Smalls” to describe the recurring, haunting experience of sudden, all-consuming, full-body hyper-awareness of the nature of the Universe.

I don’t recall the first time it happened, but it’s been happening long as I can remember. Sometimes it invites itself, sometimes I summon it. It stays long as it pleases, departs without apology, returns always and gladly.

It brings my world to a full stop, eclipses everything I was doing and thinking and perceiving and feeling. It hijacks me with electric, strobe-like flashes that expand and contract me. Macroscopic, microscopic. Galactic, subatomic. Big, small, big, small. My cells are home to stars.

I’m empty as a balloon, my emptiness is dense and heavy with it. I am deaf, my deafness is the pit that holds its orchestra. I am blinded by it, my blindness is the horizon that holds its dawn.

It’s agony, I long for it. I can’t help calling it to me, I dread its footsteps. It repels me, it captivates me. I want to forget it, I study its every page. I want to run from it, I hope it will chase me. I’m peering at it, it’s watching me. I am hunger, it swallows me whole.

The Big-Smalls is singular, unmistakable, undiluted. Pure and potent. I never build a tolerance, never acclimate to its strength. I’m helpless to turn it away, to withhold from it any part of myself.

It belongs to itself, it belongs within me. I exist within its belonging, held together by its explosions, kept intact by its perfect chaos.