Medusa Syndrome

The spelunker lives in a cave even when he makes his gallant exit from the slits of the earth, like a gentleman’s hand sliding back out from underneath silken lingerie strips clinging to the deep mysteries of womanhood, and he does so with just as much reluctance. He sees ceilings where there aren’t any and walks as though each step forward might wedge his ribcage so tight he might not be able to escape. If he finds himself on the streets in between moments inside sinkholes and solutional fractures, his exploratory lilt makes the stranger-pedestrians behind him push past while pressing cell phones close to their ears, saying, “Some asshole’s walking like he owns the place”. He then slides to the sidelines to stand under an awning, squeezed between assorted fruit stands outside cheap grocery stores, and calls his partner to pick him up with the excuse that he misses her and wants to talk to her about the new blind fish he found during his last expedition when really he can’t even remember its Latin name. As she arrives, and in the flood of solar radiation that he suddenly can’t help but let soak into his skin in an unabashed rush, he runs to the waiting, muscled arms of his lover and kisses her sun-flecked cheeks as if to douse her freckles with his saliva to extinguish the proof of light’s presence. Then she buys the avocados and bananas for snacks from the stand he stood beside and takes him back home, letting him peel them himself, but feeding him tiny bites between fond smiles as though he were her toddler. Then she runs her nails down his chest and climbs onto him, clamping her knees around his hips, pushing him against the back of his chair until he can’t move, because she knows he can’t resist being pinned. Usually she leaves him with that tease until later that night while she goes for drinks. He’ll stay, cowering away in their basement apartment where the curtains are always drawn to soak the walls in a bruised maroon expenditure. There he fondles bits of excavated rocks he brings back, which he lays on top of the coverlet and his thick pale-hair-swathed belly as he sprawls on their bed while she’s out so that he can pretend that all these different segments of the earth are growing on him in a claustrophilic way. He sometimes imagines he’d been bored into stone, carved and sculpted into an inescapable exoskeleton to clutch him that would give him a permanent position to be in and never change from. The spelunker secretly wishes he had never been born, simply because he would have preferred an eternal fetal existence where a warm womb’s flesh pressed in on him from all sides and didn’t lock quite so solidly lethal as stone did around him. He mourns that he can never go deep enough in any underground fissure to find that fetal fold within the flush of a mother that held him so completely. Not even the arms of his lover can squeeze the same, despite her obsession with weight training, nor do her blindfolds, handcuffs, or bondage knots allow for his contention, although he tells her it’s perfect because he knows she hates when she isn’t the best at things. And so the spelunker finds himself sinking again and again into the ground instead of where he wants to be in hopes that this time he’ll reach that Mecca of spelunking. He doesn’t stop moving through the crevices until his ribs are bent inwards into his vital organs by sedimentary rock and limestone. Every time he finds this grimace of life frowning its set and immovable mouth at him, he wonders if he should stay there, embraced nearly as close and tight as he needs and craves in every moment of human contact that’s just never good enough, or if he should call for help and unsatisfactory rescue. He always thinks about his collarbones, which are ringed with cracks from his cries for escape, and his heart that is so fat with scar tissue from being torn too often away from its mantled cavity, and wonders if he’ll ever be brave enough to stay. But when he feels that sinking crush of the earth squeezing him like a blemish out of an oil bumped complexion, he’ll hear the death-groping-gasp of his own hyperventilation and won’t be able to stand that the last thing his senses will perceive is that of his own bodily sounds which will cling forever to his corpse as he rots in cloistered cavern air, his flesh sagging and sticking against the rocks, and then he screams an echoic scream while breaking his own collarbones just to get out of the chthonic womb that has been contaminated by his terrestrial condition.