It was the bellringer who taught me about diamonds, of prisms, of the reflection of gravity in all directions, of the shifting of poles and the mingling of their legs, locked in terror and reverence, folding and slipping between each other like fins.

Teach me about the diamonds, I had asked him.

Within the story of the diamond, I learned about truth, I learned about what it meant to dream, I learned the language of yin and mystery. I found God in its body of contradiction.

He told me of the millenia it took to create diamonds, how they churned and fired slowly and deeply within the earth, incubating and rolling over itself. It is covered in windows, the facets reflecting in every direction, contrasting to the single point at its tip, its paradox, its lie, its essence. He told me of monks meditating upon the diamond to achieve enlightenment.

I swayed here, at the thought of enlightenment. I thought of the fall, of the revelling, of the way that I clung to body, that I felt almost inside out with my desire for it. I felt determined to go in the opposite direction, to not transcend, but to become, to dissolve myself in life, desire and suffering. We worshipped the fall as a blessing, wore its cross on our backs where our wings had once been, not in defiance, but in mercy, in thankfulness, for our mortality, for our finitude, for the opportunity to be thankful, where we were sure that we could not have been without it.

I daydreamed through the rest of his speech, meandering through the idea of prisms on my own, in the way that they change and shift everything they touch, that single pointed-ness of them, and how many different ways there are of looking at them, both from the outside and the inside. I thought of their values, I thought of how impossible it seemed that something so beautiful could exist, as if my own desire had materialized underground and unearthed itself in this precious stone. It seemed even more miracuous than voice, which is materialized sound, breath, shape, because it had form.

The bells woke me and I returned to him, foggy from my own dreams, unlatching myself from fantasy and alteration. He had seen it swarm over my eyes and talked on as if reciting a mantra or prayers to me, for their cadence, so as not to disturb the dream its brief momentary lasp. Sometimes these happened during the day. A cloud would sift over the pupils, dark as onyx, as we saw other realities of the current one, as we saw ourselves in other places, the simultaneity of existence, its breathing lines over each other. Sometimes our multiple bodies shared breath, thus inducing the dream.