Every night’s another death, that’s why sometimes I’m so reticent to sleep, having left lessons unlearnt and a days work unaccomplished. It’s like trying to build a building using the surrealist writing game, every incarnation absorbed and only the folded remnants to work with. I wonder about each soul that takes to the task, such variegated people sitting in a single skin and purpose put to rest only to be picked at like a mid-seam stitch. I wonder every day if the me I’ll be will accomplish what I wanted when his time comes, who will that be?
Sometimes her hands are mine, inhabiting my tendons to move my flesh with tenderness. I marvel as they manipulate my skin, gliding with such unbeknownst elegance. I never yet possessed such delicacy, such intimate efficacy. Her voice in my mind, such divine intervention, rendered in exquisitely fine detail, beckons and cajoles, rolls and ravishes my whole body. This bloody sack of hopes has sat, doped and somnolent, so long that corpuscles had withered to deprive my spirit of its life. Now, sometimes, her hands are mine, they sense things I could never find, and touch with blind, unexpurgated fervour.
I fell down and broke my skin then sat there staring at the wound. ‘What is it,’ Arris asked. I told her it was circumstance, clumsiness, a lack of care on my behalf. ‘Can we fix it?’ I watched the blood seeping and said, I doubt it. ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen you do,’ she said. Not getting hurt but passively accepting it. ‘You are strong and resilient. I am smart, we can fix this.’ I lay my hand over the wound so she couldn’t see it, and smile, winsome. Some things just need time to heal.
She pours thoughts upon me in the morning like sweet molasses creeping in the sun. I grow sticky with her residue. ‘I want to make the world beautiful,’ she says, not realising her presence is a progenitor of belief. ‘I want the world to be better, so badly,’ she says. ‘Why don’t people understand that the world can be art?’ I place my hand over her heart, breast adjacent with no connotation, and misuse her borrowed words. People don’t want more than they can understand. Pure beauty, as you want, as you are, is more than most can take.
I find myself staring at her dresses in the closet, her books on the shelf, her washing in the hamper, her signs of life in every space. I find myself smiling, thinking how well she occupies the emptiness, thinking of the little absences I allowed for so long, thinking of the tiny ways she fits my every day, thinking of the fullness I now feel. I find myself aware for once, as though I’d been witnessing my life through one eye, oblivious of the depth I was missing. I find myself staring at the world, awestruck by its clarity.
A mash up of mannequin legs and interlocking clams like body horror by Botticelli standing on a plinth totalling maybe two and a half metres high, fitted with a reticulating feature intermittently spurting gouty clots of lumpy red liquid. I ask Mikey what it’s supposed to be and he smiles at me for the first time in months. ‘It’s my period piece,’ he says, folding his arms. I can’t help but laugh and ask if the joke was worth it. ‘An artists place isn’t to value art,’ he tells me, ‘but yeah, it was and is totally worth it.’
A doctor told me it was low grade Tourette’s, the internet diagnosis is autonomous sensory meridian response, a memeable quality with millions of streamable views. For me, it’s a course of soft lighting extending from skull’s base to skin’s pinnacle, every cell it touches rippling and vibrating in queue with tsunamic pace. It’s some kind of sight to see, I’m told, but I wouldn’t know, my eyes always close, my mind suddenly severed from all its endeavours. They call it disorder in some circles, but I’ll happily be broken if that’s what it means, let the electricity have me.
I tell her I might be dead or merely unreal. She doesn’t balk, quiver or condescend as others might. ‘I understand,’ she says, even though I myself am just feeling out the edges. ‘It’s too good somehow,’ conveniently perfect, ‘or perfectly convenient.’ She places her hand on my heart and listens for a beat. ‘If you are dead then I must be too because this is heavenly and I couldn’t create that alone.’ We sit for a while in hand clasped silence staring at fixed points in space. I tell her, I am glad my old life has ended.
I reread the words you send me, every word, even the ones that weren’t writ for me. I want them to be rote. I want them to be seared on my brain like branded cattle. Your words carved in glorious diegesis inside of my skull so that when I am dead, choked on one more wafer thin utterance, doctors will study the remnants as though it were the very Rosetta Stone. They will call conferences and exclaim, write essays and shift blame, they will marvel, ponder, and never quite get the game, always missing one piece, your beautiful name.
It’s hard not to watch her, the water beading at her skin like sea pearls sloughed by the ocean onto a beach made of glass. You’re beautiful, I say, ignoring the shower spray hitting my face. She spits a mouthful of it in the air like a childish cherubic fountain and smiles under the downpour. ‘I’m so wet,’ she says, laughing harder than the liquid’s porcelain patter. I mean, I say, your skin looks like freshly turned ochre spread by coarse, artists fingers. ‘Shush,’ she says, get my back. I put my hands upon her gladly and drink deep.
We know the truth don’t we? The only person that ever thinks it’s you is you. Only able to run for so long before the lies slow you down like quicksand. Sure, you can hope to be buoyed by the ignorance of others but that’s its own ignorance and just salts the quagmire. What I want, desperately, is to drown or be free. Kill me or be done with petty injury, no good will come from growing spite and harvesting harm. Admit what you are and be at peace. At this point, there’s nothing holding you back but you.
‘These two chicks, it looked like a couple of hermit crabs wrestling.’ Dude, you can’t say that kind of shit anymore. ‘Fuck the ocean man, I don’t care about global warming.’ You know that’s not what I’m saying. ‘Man, at this point I don’t know what anyone is saying or what they are when they say it. All I can tell you is what I am and what the world looks like and when I say fucking hermit crabs, I don’t mean disrespect, I just mean fucking hermit crabs, all right, so get the fuck out of your shell.
Eventually I run out of bullshit to say and tell her, you‘re beautiful. Arris gives me one of her soft looks and says, ‘I know.’ Her words stick in my heart as the most wonderful of splinters, I collect them now and forge little tableaux with the material. When they are ready I unveil them to her like proud popsicle constructions of architectural marvels. ‘This is good,’ she always says, and gives me tips toward their betterment. You’re not merely beautiful but right, I tell her. ‘So are you,’ she says, unloading a fresh batch of structural substance.
The beast with two backs looms on the horizon. ‘It’ll be a full moon,’ she says. ‘People always go a little crazy.’ I stroke her hair, staring at a fixed point in space. People are always a little crazy, I tell her. The moon may shift tides but social mores make waves. She leans into me, tilts her head, exposes her neck, looks through me. ‘You aren’t as clever as you think,’ she says. I know, I should give myself more credit. ‘At least you’re funny.’ I laugh and she doesn’t. We kiss, waiting for the sun to set.
Split again by distance but tethered differently now. We walk a spiral together, passing similar landmarks at different latitudes. Each new angle viewed comes with a small exclamation avowing everything wondrous. I wish I could reel in the rope that binds us, though tracing its knots is more comfort than I could hope and its weft is weighted perfectly. I think of that inexpressible smile, a thousand types of countenance in kaleidoscopic incarnation, who’s light does it shine on tonight. I think of all I love and fasten it around myself, mooring my spirit to vast and unpredictable happiness.
A Few Short Words 