The Memory Of Breathing

I could tell you that you have all the power, here. I could tell you that, and it wouldn't be a lie. It wouldn't be, even, a half-truth. Here it is, a solid stone pillar: you have all the power. (The people who draw the maps, who delineate the borders -- they hold all the power. The rest of us, we show our passports and try hard to respect the boundaries, and leave when we are turned away at the gates.)

You are haunted by ghosts more solid than the present; they wound you and disturb your rest. They have killed something, perhaps, or very nearly. (Or worse, they have made you wish it dead.) And my ghosts, they are...what? They are things that murmur in the background, and take up space (but there is still this infinity of space, out and out and more outward-reaching, continuous); they flit around the edges of everything, and they make noise, and they make things move faster than they should, and they seem more real than the realest thing, sometimes -- often -- but they are ghosts, and we all have ghosts. And this could shatter me into a million tiny bits, a billion. Shatter me into bits so small they are like glitter, like dust, like nothing at all (but sharp-edged shiny somethings). It could shatter me, ground down into a powder so fine I could never put things back into a single solid again, not ever. Not even halfway. Everything all not-held-together and holes and hollow and not-quite-solid.

People say that things are worth the risk, and they mean that, literally. Worth taking a risk -- but nobody really says that when they think the thing that's risked might actually, or likely, come to pass. Things are often worth risks, and rarely worth consequences; this is how things feel. But this. This is worth the risk, and more than that, it is worth the potentialities, all of them, the worst ones. It is worth the bad end that I can taste like blood and metal on my tongue. It is worth the things that could happen, and the things that most probably (though sometimes there are miracles, sometimes -- and things aren't often what they seem) will happen. It is worth it, this; you are.

(Early-morning hours, and I close my eyes and fall half-asleep between my words. I write you things, eyes half-shut, not really clear, and then lay down and shut my eyes, and fall, immediately, into a dream of you. It was bad, and confused, and everything was loud shouting jarring...and then the phone rang and it woke me, eventually, and I look and it is you, although it shouldn't be, and we both know that.)

I would be different for you, if I could.

There are a hundred versions of you, inside -- a thousand, an infinity. Coming to some singular consensus must be near-impossible; I can imagine how it must be. (I can tear myself apart into a million different directions inside my mind, also, deeply down inside. We are nothing alike at all, completely opposed; we are twins; we are cracked and shining mirrors.) Inference is the only possibility when nothing is explicit; it's either that, or not considering at all (and I think we all know well enough how impossible that is).

I say things, and I do things, because life is short, and complicated, and unexpected, and things you don't do now, might not happen, ever. Not because I think these things I say and do will change anything else. Not because I'm not-so-quietly digging for...something. My compulsions are mine alone, closed-circuits, and although nothing is ever that simple, this one thing really just might be. But how can anyone explain that, and have it mean anything at all?

And when we spend the night together, we are awake until the early-morning hours, when light turns aquatic and exhaustion is a so, so solid thing. When our bodies are tangled up in each other, and everything is fingertips and mouths and warm and wet and sliding into pleasure, floating, jumping off the edge of cliffs, and the landing never comes, because there are no hard places here -- when everything is whispers, and the words aren't important, the words are secondary, the hush is everything.

Things were different, then...and then things changed, and they change and change again, and things are different, always. Sometimes imperceptible and sometimes glaring smack-in-the-face, and sometimes only in your head, and sometimes only in everybody else's. And again and again and again. Things were different, before, and they are different now. And we go to sleep, eventually, and in the morning, when we wake up, it's like everything raw and new and waiting. Things can be whatever you want them to be. Because you are the one creating them, new, with every breath. (You just have to remember how to breathe, and then...keep remembering.)