#astlr

Have you heard the story? The story goes:

Hands trailing through the dry rot of the building, chlorine from the hotel pool still stuck to your skin, and underneath your hands in the quivering plastermeat of the wall the pipes moan like dying men. Every empty building is a ghost, dead and dead and loved if it’s lucky. You live in hotels most of the time, transient coma-places, life-support humans rushing in and out their hallways but this is an old house. The people who called you here called it haunted and it took all you had not to say “no, no its just dead” now you say “sweetheart, oh sweetheart you must have really loved them” as you find the boiler, the electrical box, every single load-bearing wall- blood and neurons and bones. Such a sweet ghost, to have held on so long, to have stubbornly kept the walls upright and the lights on and the water running and the lock from turning open when it wasn’t a hand it recognized holding the key. You turn the utilities off until there’s just one candle in the kitchen left to burn with its soul. “they’re not coming home this time,” you say and pinch the wick, “this time you have to go to them.”

You taste the blood in your mouth long before you reach the center of the wreckage. It’s a familiar taste. Being here is familiar too, a burned out husk of a metaphor and you can feel it on the verge of collapse. Nothing here is poetry, or it won’t be once you leave. It’s unsustainable. It was dying when you got here. The supports got taken out at the knees. You wade deeper in- into the red and a vast, endless red and a red that burns like acid in the veins and so on and so forth. Same shit as always. Same as always, he’s in the center and he convulses, the bleed-out-heart of the place. In part, he is the wreckage and in part he is the destruction and he is the metal taste in your mouth, which makes you feel all nostalgic. When you were a kid and he wasn’t around you used to suck pennies, chasing that taste. It’s not his fault he’s like this, but that doesn’t really matter to the shape the wreckage used to be, or really the person you used to be before you were also made undone, burned clean through from the inside out. It’s not so bad. It’s mostly just red in a way that strains your lungs. It’s familiar. When you offer your hand, he always takes it. Even knowing what he does to this world, he still lets you take him home.

There’s just no trick to it, of course. One day you wake up and the world’s on skew. The walls go halfway through you and halfway holds your weight and it is faith faith faith that makes your skin solid under your own hands. You have to die sometime, and the after sprawls and sprawls and sprawls into forever.

Floods are coming soon. Clear water ones, ones that rush past your feet, shallow currents. Barely puddles. You don’t know where it’s coming from but you do know it’s not going to stop. You take a walk and the water comes with you, little waterfalls at curbs, then making your steps mud-slick, then crashing to fill the clearing you stop in. Overhead, you can see the full milky way, burning its way into your eyes despite the bright blue sky. It’s spring. The apple trees are in bloom.

You have always been one brilliant thing but every fist fight you get into divides a bitter sum, split lip, the value of the sun gold + heavy as rings you wear to leave damage still a shackle engraved so pretty you put it on yourself. You wondered what the trick was years ago and now you’ve spat enough blood and tooth shard to know it was a sucker’s punch bet the whole time.

There are days where I long for a gentle haunting. Hands on the mirrorpanes painting notes, floorboards creaking when I am laying still and quiet in bed, the darkness moving when I turn the lights out and head upstairs. It is habit, at this point, to wait on the stairs a moment to see if any ghosts have moved in. Many of the things I do are habits these days. It is a loneliness that drives me, yes. It is a loneliness that drives many hauntings. The dead want us to know they’re still here. It is complimentary, then, that I wish for something to be there, when I am alone and I am afraid, when I am in the kitchen baking bread and it is like no other could enter, when it is late and I am awake too long. Ghosts have sacrificed their own memory to become what they are now. It would be an art, piecing the ragged edges together again. I would want this despite the risk of things breaking- all my plates and cups are plastic. My hands shake. I drop things too, it’s okay. We can sweep this up. Should closed-window curtains thrash I would think of how much I love the winds before a storm. I long for a gentle haunting. Some days I start to wonder if I am already one myself.

Desert got its bones in you. Can’t love anything that immortal and not come back changed, come back unscathed. Sand weathered skin and conditional immortality. Black glass fucking city in the desert where you lived all lit up and shining like arson gone domestic, black fucking glass in the sand where the lightning strikes reflect the night sky. Rainstorm on the horizon. Desert got into your fucking blood by this point. Rainstorm overhead. Floodwater would kill you just as sure as the sun does. Rainstorm over the far-off lit up belly of the city. If you look there are things that grow in the desert. Rainstorm on the far horizon. If you look there are things that live with the desert in them just like you do. Wasteland with a green underbelly. Desert wrapped around your soul and sinking roots in. Conditional immortality. The desert says to you, one night when the cold is in your lungs deeper than any word you’ve ever spoken, you will die, yes. I will kill you, yes. You will come back, yes. Rainstorm on the horizon. Floodwater. Drought. To live in a desert is to know each extreme. To live with the desert in your soul is to not be killed by either. Sun breaks like an egg over the sky. The desert carves new houses for itself out of your bones.