It’s reverse mummification. She put my brain back in first, then my heart, and my lungs, then all of the essentials in sequential. Consequently, I began to think again, to love, and breathe, and fill myself once more with life. Slowly she unraveled the bandages that had bound my aggrievances and grievous insecurities. I was administered to with purpose, poise, and passion. I was looked upon and told, ‘These are not wounds, these are birthrights, birthmarks, and merits. They will be seen and gleam. Each one a story told in discreet cellular makeup.’ I was not exonerated but exhumed.
I put on my pyjama pants, only my brain doesn’t call them that, it calls them yours. It’s a funny little moment, just one in a dozen daily instances that remind me how quickly we’ve commingled our minds. I no longer possess any decent nouns, nor impropriety, only tactile verbs. Smell, touch, taste, sleep, kiss, fuck, eat, cry, laugh, burrow, embed. I lay myself down and think of us. Of our bed. Of us in it. Of its vastness when empty. Of its occupied warmth. Hug, talk, sing, sigh, whimper, pant, proclaim. Love. I fall asleep in your arms.
I keep dropping your brain on people that don’t even know you. Yeah, I say, you were telling me about that the other day, or showed me this article, or read it, said it, did it… All the things you know and do in my conversations; depth, breadth and dimensions, I only wish it were truly you and not just your thought. Actually, I was telling my friends only the other day about how you’d said that or something similar, I think. Funny, I can’t quite remember now, I’ll have to ask you next time I talk to someone.
On my stomach with my arms above my head, more than half adrift in the afterglow and groggy on the emptiness. Cleo tracks her nails around my back while she ruminates and waits for me to purr, a thing of idle not intention. ‘How often do you think about sex?’ Her voice harbours the dry workmanship of putting up wallpaper. Most of all the time, I tell her, at some point everything boils down to sex and my brain does the rest. ‘Sounds like your brain’s the thing boiling,’ she says. I close my eyes and let it simmer.
A Few Short Words 