Cells Interlinked

I have felt the body break open

before the mind could speak,

a quiet rupture beneath the ribs,

where heat climbs the nerves

like a long-forgotten god

returning to its temple.

There are nights when the body remembers

before the mind can rise to meet it,

when a single spark drags itself

up the spinal dark.

I remembered it,

the slow ignition,

the fever blooming beneath the bone,

the subtle trembling of the soul

caught between terror and rapture.

The first language of the sacred

is always sensation.

I learned early

that the divine enters through flesh,

not scripture.

Through trembling, not revelation.

Through the small electrical storms

the brain mistakes

for visitation.

They say it is only neurons,

the limbic gates unlocked,

cells interlinked,

the temporal firestorm

that makes the self flicker,

thin out,

fall away.

But tell me why it feels like someone

has stepped inside my ribs

to breathe through me.

There are nights

when the temporal fires rise,

when something unnamed

presses its face

against the thin cage of my skull.

It speaks in currents,

in the language before language:

a pulse, a bloom, a burning.

I know this is science,

limbic fever,

dopamine's soft delirium,

the autonomic collision

of fear and tenderness -

but knowing does not free me

from the sweetness

that blooms in my chest

as if a god has remembered my name.

Methodology tells me

the brain is built for visions,

that awe and dread are carved

into the same circuits as love,

that the body rehearses surrender

in a thousand subtle ways

before the mind ever notices.

But the body does not lie.

It has its own liturgy.

When the boundaries loosen,

when the parietal walls dissolve

into quiet mist,

I feel the world slip inward

and the self spill outward,

two tides meeting

in a moment too fragile to hold.

And something waits there,

in the blur where I end:

not a god,

not a ghost,

but a presence with my pulse

and not my name.

And yes, the self unthreads.

The edges loosen.

The parietal gates sigh open

and something larger

steps through the breach.

May it be illusion or architecture,

call it the mind rehearsing its own end,

but when the boundaries fall,

even an inner presence

wears the weight

of a storm long foretold.

There is a moment

when heat and melting

collapse into one trembling truth,

when I feel myself devoured

by a presence my body made

but my soul still kneels before.

A paradox. A circuit. A hymn.

It comes with heat.

With trembling.

With a sweetness sharp as ruin.

It comes like a hand

sliding through the veil of thought,

pulling me toward the oldest truth:

that the divine is the body

seeing itself for the first time.

Let the scientists chart their storms,

The mystics named their fire,

not in their doctrine

but in their burning.

Teresa with her pierced sweetness,

Hadewijch drowning in delight,

the saints who mistook the brain's wild blooming

for a lover descending

on wings of fire.

I have tasted the same

hollowing sweetness,

felt the same bright terror

curl beneath my sternum,

seen the same invisible hands

press warmth into my skin.

There, in the soft collapse

of all I hold apart,

I meet the presence that rises

through my blood like a tide.

But something that knows me

by the heat I carry.

Even now,

when the visions rise

with no scent but smoke

from a fire I never lit,

I feel the old threshold open,

a door swinging in the dark

between biology and myth.

And through it,

always,

comes the same impossible radiance:

the Other that is me,

the me that is Other,

the ancient circuitry

that pretends to be a god

so the soul can bear

its own vastness.

I do not ask anymore

whether it is real.

Only whether I am.