The Story in Five Parts (From End to Beginning)
(Zero
She has let forgetting define her. She has let scars achromatize. She has let her lungs empty, and her hair grow, and her eyes shrink. She is longing for a home.)
One
It is colder now, so in the nighttime when she exhales her breath is a ghost in the air. There is snow everywhere. Some moments when there is nobody to watch she lays down in it and feels like a she is painting colors on the pale canvas of the world, and some moments she lays down and feels like she is a frozen, inanimate body, asphyxiated in the bleached abstract.
She sits up in the snow bank thinking that you are a phone booth she just stumbled into.
Two
I like smokers because they understand self-harm better than most. They are a colossal group of people who are puff and suck and breath out fire, saying “We’re probably won’t live as long as you. Is that a problem?” Sometimes I think people smoke to keep from dissolving all together. The way a person keeps from crying by laughing too much and too loudly and holds her eyes still in their sockets even though there might be a million different things she would like to see. Sometimes the only way to alleviate the pain in a heart is to destroy the body.
Three
Then there is sludge. Every night there are nightmares in which she is rolling down a long hill covered in dark grass towards a sea of sludge containing all the sinking things in the world. And in the sky where the moon should be there is a dilated eyeball that is staring at her and asking her to forget and to let the forgetting define each day. And she rolls and rolls and rolls and waits for the moon to blink and is frantically waving her arms over her head to anybody at the top who might be looking out for sinking things. Then she wakes up sharply, freezing and strangled and thinks about all the windows in a graveyard and all the walls in a church and wishes she were dead for a split second. But the minute she thinks of killing herself the images of broken necks and stomach pumps and bare veins push into her mind so she says to herself, “I will take up smoking first, and work my way there.”
Four
Briefly, there might be a moment of peace in which you humor my need to keep you close.
But in the end it only makes it more obvious that something has died and has been placed in a tomb that is slowly filling with sand.
Five
Here is how it starts: he is thin as bones when she first meets him; she is puffing on cigarette and some kind of light is coming from her head. He is very easily swayed by the all noise flowing out of her. She wonders out loud if her soul is like a birdbath or like the Mississippi River.
And then there is a drink. And then there is a song. And words, a fountain, love.
At moments every tiny movement of his mouth makes her own mouth twitch anxiously. At moments she loses her head in the obscurity of this ideal, full of words and lips and bodies that color all the hours in the day.
There was talk of winning the lottery and running away. There is a talk of a tree house. There is talk of an adventure. There is talk of escaping into an abstract, where there is significance in two people who are meant to be together.
Then there is nothing
[© 2010 Sophia Nelson]
