Space is a vacuum, so I shouldn’t be surprised that your moving lips betray no sound. I shouldn’t be surprised at the thin trickle of blood from your left nostril where the veins have begun to burst from the pressure. I shouldn’t be surprised at the slow motion of your eyelids, blinking over spherical tears escaping unwillingly – you’ve not let yourself cry since I’ve known you.
There’s a galaxy of longing swirling away inside of me, birthing black holes in all my vital organs, exploding in supernovas of agony and spinning into a destructive frenzy – I swear I feel I could cough blood. You look at me and smile as another star dies a fiery death in my chest, just a little left of centre, and I smile back before you return your attention to your conversation.
Internal doctors check charts and make grave predictions – I know what I have to do to stop this madness, stop the tearing, burning pain, stop the universe and start it over from scratch. I know that it’s you, that it’s always been you: the uncaused cause who set these things in motion, who instigated the tightly clenched ball of matter that exploded into glorious life. I know that it’s you who has to go in this ever-expanding metaphor for what’s eating away me.
I don’t know how I manage to pull you away from everyone else, but the minute I do, new stars struggle to be born in the chaotic order that my insides have become, and each one of them shines with a tentative light fuelled by the rightness of your arms tightening around my torso, the rightness of your voice thrumming in my ear. I don’t know how I manage to pull you away. I don’t know how I manage to pull away from you.
You follow, of course, hand on my back, and the galaxies swirl and brighten and the black holes expand themselves to swallow, it seems, my very soul, or at least wreak so much havoc on my organs that I fall down dead.
And then you’re gone, and for a moment I do not see you, and for a moment my chaotic universe orders itself and the planets evolve life and the galaxies swirl on.
And there you are, drifting, the vacuum of space doing to your body what the vacuum of your heart has done to mine, ravaging everything, leaving nothing untouched, unsullied, unbroken. There’s a galaxy of longing swirling away inside of me, birthing black holes in all my vital organs, exploding in supernovas of agony and spinning into a destructive frenzy – I swear I feel I could cough blood. You look at me and smile as another star dies a fiery death in my chest, just a little left of centre, and I smile back before you drift too far for me to see, before I’ve lost you forever and my universe contracts in my chest too rapidly for the laws of physics.
[Apologies to Mike and Jordano, who heard this at the last Creative Writing Club meeting I attended. I've no acceptable excuse for not having something new.]
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3 comments:
What I notice is you bring a whole physical aspect to a lot of your work. You comment on bodily fuunctions becuase you..have to. In a way. It doesn't work unless you do. I tend to just comment on them, the body is just a transport for the feeling I'm putting across in my piece. But you really bring in the whole..body. It makes it feel very humane and physical.
DOes that make sense?
This piece I feel is very physical.
I like it. It's just something I've noticed.
I like the cosmic (spatial?) conceit, I think it functions very cleverly and you explore it in depth without creating too much repetition. Jessica, I think you write very very well, however I'd like to offer an opinion, take it with a grain of salt: I find your pieces -- especially those on love and relationships -- tend to be very general, they're always sort of vague ambiguous situations. Maybe I'm too cynic, but I find it's hard to keep track of where you're going sometimes and follow the flow of the piece because there isn't any narrative per se. I'd like to see you write something grounded in more factuality, where something actually happens, where characters really interact and do specific things. I think it would be a more efficient way to communicate the things you have to say about the themes you have to explore while making your prose more engaging -- and I'm tempted to say: believable, although that's a stretch because I'm not sure the purpose of a writer is to make what he's writing believable. I'm pretty sure a writer's goal is to make his work engaging, though, and I think that would be a good way for you to make your writing more engaging.
I'm not quite sure all that makes sense, but that's what I came up with after reading this...
I agree with both previous comments here. I love how your pieces are physiologically based, and at the same time they wander in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. It's almost as if the narrator is in a trance, and the mind and body are two separate things - there is the physical body, and then there are the inner thoughts that are trapped within the narrator's mind. It's like the narrator is so emotionally overwhelmed that (s)he is circling round and round inside his/her head in a way that doesn't always coincide with reality.
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