The World In Words

As we lay together under what you would call cotton candy skies, my head resting ever so slightly on your shoulder- and I had demanded you hold my hand, just to be nearer to you- I think about how the universe is a breath. One great big cycle of inhale and exhale, creation and destruction, order to chaos, a complicated process of inspiration and expiration. Molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide exchanged by fleshy sacs covered in blood vessels, all orchestrated by things like chemoreceptors and chemical messengers or thoughts of anxiety floating through my brain. No different than the waves crashing to shore and receding before us. I think about how hard it is for people to see the vastness of the universe, and the smallness of ourselves, and how that never bothered me, never made me feel insignificant or less. It made me feel like a miracle, a one in a million chance of stardust coming to life and deciding to make a little poetry of this strange world.

It’s been a long time since this page felt like a friend and not a stranger. I run out of use for these written words when I’m happy. And though I can’t sleep at night right now and I sleep all day instead and I might lose my job and exhaustion hangs heavy over me as I try to outrun it from under our green comforter, I am happy. In a way I’ve never been before, certainly not this long before. Everything is so stable, so secure, and though I have learned not to crave the excitement of chaos, I still find surprise in all this security. At how much it suits me. I think I have a real chance to finally blossom and I hope that’s why everything hurts a little right now. The flower is beautiful, because no one felt the thirst and yearning in its roots, the labor of its leaves, the cost of such delicate pretty petals.

They played a song I recognized from some deep memory of riding in your car together, back when we were only 16 and we’re still best friends and I haven’t ruined anything yet. We’re still facing the start, and the world tastes like our hope and freedom. The lyrics are silly, but we know every word. And I find I suddenly miss you, cutting and visceral, the kind of longing that can only be for a person that doesn’t exist anymore. It grips me even in my drunken stupor, from the fog of my high. Back when we were two halves of the same whole, two faces of the same coin. I only have myself to blame that we’re severed, estranged. No more or less similar than two strangers at the same train stop. It’s been so long since you knew me better than I knew myself, since you would hold me in your bed as I cried over whatever stupid boy I was obsessed with. I still remember you crying in bed next to me on Christmas when I’m 18, and I don’t want to be there because I want to spend all my time at my boyfriend’s house, because it hurts to be apart and I’m uncomfortable without him and I don’t recognize the wrongness of that yet. I remember clearly the last time I felt truly connected to you, like when we were kids who went through everything together. You slept on the futon downstairs in the townhouse, it was black and metal. I came down and we watched the crime drama channel on TV, LMC I think it was. We caught the middle of a movie, Obsession, I think it was. A man stalking an underage ballerina. We made fun of the whole thing and laughed so much it hurt. We were going to our grandparents’ after so we showered together to save time. That might have been the last time we showered together, as we did when we were kids. And then we left, the day continued on and I’ve lost the details to time. What I wouldn’t give to have that day back now, that familiar comfort, always more twins than sisters. How far away those days seem, like trying to remember a half forgotten dream. I can’t remember the last time I was comfortable in your arms, in your presence. I let out one big gasp the moment I’m free of your atmosphere. Now I just feel small and all wrong any time you’re looking at me. I try to blame you or make excuses for our present predicament. But I can’t blame you really, after all you had me for a sister and I did the job terribly. And now we’re two broken and unfamiliar souls, lone and foreign even to ourselves. Grandma taught us that bond was sacred, and I wonder what that makes me if I was able to finally break it?

Writing always felt different for me. From that very first time I discovered it, entirely on accident no less. A poetry project for 7th grade English. My classmates would ask me to help with their pieces, how did you write that? How did you know how to say that? How do you choose the words? I had no answers for them. I was not choosing or knowing. I used to say that the pencil moved me, some invisible lips whispered in my ear and I couldn’t ignore it. The words were just there, floating in the space between the desks, in the pause between each pencil scratch, lingering with the dust motes under fluorescent lights, and I only had to let them flow into me. I think, most people, at best, use language as a tool, a weapon, a device. An instrument to meet their needs. I think, at worst, most people are so deaf and blind to the precise meanings, the beauty of a well put together sentence, the intricacies behind one word over another. Everything that lies in wait under the surface of that font. It always bothered me, that writing, that language and words, were so easily counterfeit. It was the only kind of blasphemy I knew. Writing, to me, was a force of nature, an energy, an element, unseen but wielding unmistakable effect, like gravity, woven into the fabric of existence with us. You can’t see it, and most people go their whole lives without realizing it’s really there, let alone how it works, but once upon a time an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and nothing was the same after that. And at 13, I could lose myself in the orbit of that great celestial body, I happily let it carry my body across the universe, into the stars. But then you’re not 13 anymore, and even though you promised it wouldn’t, somehow life takes hold. That unheard song, that unseen power, it faded further and further away without me, the more I neglected it, got too busy, put it aside for necessary things. I always thought the stories would leave me one day. That, finally, one day I wouldn’t feel that pull, that ache, in my soul, in the deepest center of my chest, when the story was over. I thought one day I wouldn’t be inhabited by them anymore, if one day I grew to love my life enough, love myself enough. And I do love my life now, and I do love myself the best way I know how, but still, I pick up that book, I watch that movie, I listen to that story, and I’m gone. Each time it’s over, it’s like re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. It’s bittersweet, the love, the longing. I imagine it’s how an astronaut would feel looking at Earth from so far above, captivating and beautiful and terrifyingly alone. You love the view, you love the way it feels, but in a weird way it always makes you miss home, and yet yearn for it once more as soon as your feet touch the ground. I never imagined the stories would keep finding me, across all this time and space.

My thoughts are a black sea and how easily the roiling current drags me under.