Filed under: Snake Face
Like Pavlov’s dog, she still jumps, whimpers, and barks whenever she hears the phone ring. She expects that he is coming to pick her up. She expects this after nearly 3 weeks since his disappearance. I wonder as I watch her this morning, fretting for the umpteenth time that her boy has come to get her, if it is conditioning or if she has the ability to hope. Does she sense that he is gone from the deal but keep a sense of hope that he will be able to come back and share in “pack-life” again? Or maybe those are my own sick and deep-seated hopes.
I chewed a hole in my face as a slept. Perhaps I was trying to find a way out of my own head, a method of getting outside of myself. Perhaps like Pavlova I claw at my own flesh. Am I in need of a human-heart replication? If they can make a rat-zombie-heart project, what kind of lab animal can I be?
How can I arrest the blood-bone-sinew-stagnation of heart break? Did I hold it back for so long that it will consume me? I want to rage, I want to run-away. Right now I want to curl up in a ball on this bench and wail. Put my head between my knees and scream. Put my fist through a wall. Scream at the sky.
I have swallowed all of this for so long, pretended that I wouldn’t miss him so because of my stubbornness. Up close his ugliness was so stark that I could feel why we shouldn’t be…friends…lovers….I don’t know. I felt big and now i feel small. I felt numb and now I feel raw. I felt capable and now I feel dysfunctional. I didn’t mourn our Panda and now I feel the loss. By myself. I want to put my head in your hands so that you can carry the weight of it for awhile.
My pinky habitually creeps across my ring finger to gently rub the ring on my finger when I am thinking, sad, nervous. My pointer finger on the other hand habitually points down to push the ring on my thumb down so that it wont fall off. This still happens 3 days after the rings are gone. Every time it happens I am startled that they are not there. I wonder if it would have been better to leave the rings on so that my fingers could keep doing their dance of habit while I remained unaware of it. Or perhaps remove the particular fingers involved in this choreography.
I felt like you were still somehow more mine…I didn’t feel bad making love to you, I feel sad that you couldn’t treasure it, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I know your body, I know your mind. I know how you bite, lick, suck, fuck. So many of your cells are imbued with my DNA, more than I can tabulate here. I am in you, you are in me at all times still, even if you pretend it’s not so. I read that you carry the DNA from all of your ex-lovers.
I walk up the hill. On the top, I find your house and look down upon it. It is the only way I have felt remotely close to you in days and days and it makes me shake. I feel the tether of my heart that pulls towards you and imagine severing it as best I can. I still shake and have to force myself away. I walk around the hill to get down and your house with it’s cars comes closer into focus and makes my spirit feel vaguely appeased by getting closer to you, somehow, anyhow. As I walk down the hill, your house out of sight, the sensation in my body is tangible. I feel like I inhabit my body, my heart, and the sense of sadness and weight that my cells are currently imbued with. I know it is better if I stay inside of it, feel it fully and resist the urge to push myself out of my own body. it’s strange how the body works–that you can push your own self outside of your skin. Sometimes when I allow my heart to take up it’s entitled space in my ribcage, it makes my sternum hurt.
Stripped of my humanity, of the respect that could have been given, I stand naked and walk upstage. I slowly ease a slip over my head. An Article of clothing that only gives the pretense of cover. I am stuck in this cubicle, this world of sound, impulse, mechanics, movement.
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