It's still here. I still feel its traces. A kaleidoscope of jagged shapes and dissonant colors floating in the space between my throat and my gut. They move as one, but I feel the turning of every sharp edge breaking tendon and tissue, lancing through every vein. Every piece is disjointed and disconnected, as if belonging to many different puzzles.
I try to walk but it feels like the rest of the world moves instead and I am always at the same spot held down by a magnetic force. I speak, but the sound does not come from my mouth, bouncing off the walls instead.
I couldn't stand the thought of being with another person. The thought of life pulsing at close proximity makes me want to vomit. 'How do you move like that?' I want to shout. 'How do you think that way? How can you ignore flesh and blood and decay when it is all around you? How can you think of fighting, when surrendering is so much easier?'
The Universe is very, very old. It is used up, crumbling, filled with patchwork and running on blistered feet. It is exhausted and my skin all but feels it. Sleep is what the Universe wants -- quiet, dark, cold, and lasting sleep.
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Monday, September 05, 2011
The Cut Deepens
It was maddening almost to the breaking point, the way it was this evening. Life pulsed inside that little corner of the world, like living light trapped in a blackened glass bubble. It was sickening, when you are both light and blackened glass -- pushing and throbbing for escape, at the same time contracting and constricting to imprison.
At one table a young couple was stealing kisses when they think no one was looking. At another, four young professionals discuss business. At the table behind me, a middle-aged woman was quiet with intense concentration, eyes darting left to right as she lets words out onto her laptop screen. Life was singing in that quiet little corner in the city, sonorous like the rush of water in a deep, wide river flowing out into the ocean.
Everything terrified me. Everything, moving at the same time -- singing, flowing, squirming and writhing like the monsters of myth -- bore deep into flesh and bone and drew out a steady trickle of liquid fear, thick and grey and steaming. I wanted to howl from fear and grief. I wanted to howl until my soul came out through my mouth, vanishing into the damp night air.
What I wanted. What I wanted. What I wanted was to die, be forgotten, and never thought of as having ever existed, but -- as I'd always pondered year after year, day after day, second after excruciating second -- some unknown force stays my hand. Nameless it stays, though it has lodged itself in different parts of my body, and I am kept alive.
In the meantime, life keeps pulsing -- a steady, rhythmic beat. A distant, sonorous melody. A call. A call. A call.
At one table a young couple was stealing kisses when they think no one was looking. At another, four young professionals discuss business. At the table behind me, a middle-aged woman was quiet with intense concentration, eyes darting left to right as she lets words out onto her laptop screen. Life was singing in that quiet little corner in the city, sonorous like the rush of water in a deep, wide river flowing out into the ocean.
Everything terrified me. Everything, moving at the same time -- singing, flowing, squirming and writhing like the monsters of myth -- bore deep into flesh and bone and drew out a steady trickle of liquid fear, thick and grey and steaming. I wanted to howl from fear and grief. I wanted to howl until my soul came out through my mouth, vanishing into the damp night air.
What I wanted. What I wanted. What I wanted was to die, be forgotten, and never thought of as having ever existed, but -- as I'd always pondered year after year, day after day, second after excruciating second -- some unknown force stays my hand. Nameless it stays, though it has lodged itself in different parts of my body, and I am kept alive.
In the meantime, life keeps pulsing -- a steady, rhythmic beat. A distant, sonorous melody. A call. A call. A call.
