gently, though, gentle [ isabella; day four ]

gently, though, gentle [ isabella; day four ] Mar 26, 2022 8:24:27 GMT -5

Quote

Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Mar 26, 2022 8:24:27 GMT -5

I S A B E L L A

Listen, there’s nothing out there for us anymore. The snow is melting. Somewhere outside, a child has been born and that first, painful breath has rushed deep into her lungs, so fast does it happen that she surprises herself when she hears the scream that erupts from her small, raw throat. It’s the same scream and the same time, a mother’s bent body over a pine box casket burying her son. When the box is lowered into the earth, she must stop herself from walking down with him, of their two bodies shifting in the space so that they might fit, pressed nose to nose for the rest of time. I imagine that I am her, curled amongst the lush leaves in a casket.

My hands are reaching out, fingers opening and closing around nothing but the cool breeze that whistles through the undergrowth. I want a stranger’s face—a man’s sharp jaw or a woman’s hollowed cheeks—and I want to take it gently in my hands, which is to say I want to be trusted blindly, that man sinking the weight of his life into my open and wanting palms, and I would be careful in asking about his life, and I would ask after his life, all of it that he might and should not remember.

I’d ask him if he remembers that first, tired breath, the strain of taking air into the lungs for the first time. I’d tell him that I remember my own, the fire down my throat as I was laid on my mother’s chest, how I screamed for those first days on end and no one could figure out the fuss. This was my life, after all, and it was fine.

It was all just fine.

I think of crawling beside her in a casket, how her angular nose and mine would fit but just barely and not really, though we’ll force it for the rest of millennia, our bones sharp and determined. How in the dark night of death I’ll wrap my fingers around her wrist or hers ridged along my collarbone, and we’ll each think yes, this is what it means to love, and neither of us will say it, though we’ll be so close I think we’ll feel it shift from one body to the next, and language will have no real use anymore, and maybe that’s what I’m envious of now, the fact that I needed to reach out to string my finger along Bowie’s jaw and tell him, you’re not you; you’re not you.

I’m not me in here either.

I’ve never been myself in the present, but a human born of reflection which means I will never get to the heart of the matter at hand, and what I’m trying to say is I have not really laid hands on that emptiness after all.

[ table: pogue ]

[ maint tbd ]

[ final italicized line from the diary of virginia woolf ]