As I stand here in the doorway in this second, less than a second, an instant between time, a synapse, I’m overcome, undone, suspended in a moment of what? Revelation? No. I hate the word. Anyone claiming revelation is usually a charlatan, ultra-religious, or insane — not that these three types are mutually exclusive. In fact, they rarely are. Perhaps this is a moment of “eureka,” though the word feels burdened by the mythos of masculine scientific discovery, from Archimedes’ fateful bath to Newton’s gravity-weighted apple (why do I always imagine it hitting his head?). A “vision” is perhaps closer, but vision also carries religious undertones and the unfortunate limitations of its sensory association. A vision suggests something that is seen, either literally with one’s eyes in a new way or within the mind’s eye. As the ever-favoured child of the senses, sight seems to get undue credit for every discovery. If anything, like Proust and his madeleine, smell has always been the source of my strongest visions. But this moment of awareness is beyond sight, beyond any one sense. Even before my eyes have had time to fully adjust to the darkness, I am perceiving your body with every fibre of my own.

What I seek is a word that does not suggest a long sought-for answer, but rather a deluge of questions. A word for a kind of illumination that recalls a caver holding a torch up in an underground chamber and apprehending a few dashes of rock wall at a time, uncertain of how far the cavern extends into darkness. The first word in the Book of Revelation is apokalypsis, which in its original koine Greek means “unveiling” or “revelation.” It’s a word that seems to contain the possibility of discovery in the moment of destruction. Just as theatre is revealed in the instant of its disappearance. It exists in the temporal present between being and un-being, in what Plato calls the “something inserted between motion and rest… in no time at all.” I like the almost preposterous gravity of apokalypsis, how its cataclysmic and eschatological associations mirror the way in which one world seems to end and another begins in a moment of newfound awareness.

But as your body comes into focus, “unveiling” somehow feels the most apt. An encounter, smell, sight, sensation that unveils an infinite system of questions and discoveries, which in turn spur more questions. Like a man in white gloves pulling a shroud off a painting, removing a covering that concealed what was there all along. Something which has been rendered ever more extraordinary by the very fact of its concealment. Not a divine conjuring, but a moment of discovery arising from matter-of-fact and mortal circumstances. A new way of experiencing something already in the world.