i. and maybe this is how it begins; isn’t it strange to be glued
to the ceiling? Your body dances below you and yet you are flesh–
bound to black-painted plumbing, and isn’t it strange to watch yourself?
Electrical wires lash you to creaky pipes and you can hear the creaking
of your brittle bones, spine arching, arching, aching. And maybe
this is tetanus, this is lockjaw, this is your body stretched taut
and plucked raw, except your body is just a few feet below and
neither taut nor raw, only far away; isn’t it strange to separate
from your physical form? Isn’t this strange?
ii. You pass out.
iii. when your eyes open, you are sprawled on the floor, staring
at the exact spot on the ceiling that you were bound to only a minute
ago, or maybe it was an eternity ago, but you can feel your fingers, now,
and they are tangled in another girl’s skirt; you have fallen onto her,
collapsed in the middle of this rehearsal. At least you have returned
to this body, diffused through thin skin and settled back down in it,
though the inside of your mouth now tastes like unfamiliarity. The
dance instructor fusses about your fall and your pallor and offers
ginger-flavored candy. She claims it will bring back your color,
but all it does is sting. Your taste buds burn and it stings, it stings,
and yet still, it cannot wear away this new, foreign flavor.
iv. You don’t ever pass out again.
v. still, sometimes, you wake up in sky or soil or ceiling or anything
that isn’t your own skin and find unfamiliarity hiding between teeth,
and it tastes like ginger and the dust on the floor when you fell.
An unfaithful guest, you can’t stop fleeing this house and its walls of
thin skin; all it craves is something more than emptiness and that
is the only thing you cannot give. And maybe it began with ascension
and maybe this is how it ends; an eternity of unfamiliarity—
so really, not an ending at all.
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