part two.

dear velvet, dear dust motes, dear vena cava,

If you listen closely, you can feel the wings of a cicada. Stay tuned next for the feeling of a hangnail getting caught on your shirt. 

The Curtain Rises 

You are sitting on your porch steps. Cicadas chirp loudly, and the sun is easing herself slowly down into the earth; imagine a glowing woman sinking cautiously into hot water. The sky is muted tones of yellow and grey and pink. You feel peculiar. The street light directly in front of your house is on for the first time in months. This strikes you as important. A strange feeling of unraveling spirals through your body like a shiver. It starts at your toes and moves up through your calves and thighs and belly button and breastbone and throat and out the top of your head. You imagine the double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid unraveling in an infinite loop. This image is fitting. Some days, you feel as though you are one step away from falling into an abyss. Today is not one of those days.

A light breeze rustles through the trees and you sigh along with the susurrus of the leaves. You sit on your steps for a long time. You feel more peaceful than you have in a long time. It is the quietest it has been in a long time. The sun settles down past the horizon, night crawls forward. Inside your house, later, you set the table, you eat your dinner, you cry. You undress yourself, you take a shower, you climb into bed with a hot mug of tea, you prepare to sleep. You do this every night. You watch in fascination as your hands lift the mug to your mouth and your tongue tastes the tea and your throat bobs as you swallow. The unraveling continues. You are outside yourself. You are minute. You are mammoth.

Your eyelids drift closed, you feel your pupils shifting. You exhale deeply, thoroughly, the particles of your lungs rearranging themselves in a new pattern. The stars flutter on your eyelashes. Slowly, imperceptibly, you drift over the edge into sleep — an errant toe flirting with the line to no-man’s land. Your dreams are turbulent and shifting, filled with repeating images of a strange man: he is tall and thin like a rake, with skin as white as paper, eyes too large for his skull, and tightly curled red hair that splits in a perfect line down the center, much like the two halves of a brain. In your dream, you are a child again, just even with your mother’s elbow. The strange man approaches you, and each time you turn away screaming. Your body shifts in discomfort, but you do not wake. You will not remember this dream in the morning.

In the small, dark hours of the night, you stir. Your body moves sluggishly, like fish through water in the dead of winter. You roll onto your side and, with clumsy, sleep-numbed fingers, push back the curtain. The moon bathes you in her light. You feel a kernel of this blossom inside you, in a place like the hollow of your collarbone, or the dip of your elbow, but not quite. A voice inside calls you to the moon, echoing along a tether drawn between you and her rocky surface like an impossibly long string tied between two tin cans. You whisper questions to her, but she is cold and inorganic and distant, and she does not reply. Eventually, you drift back to sleep.