a collection of random writings i'll never do a single thing with

[hiddenramen]

I was going through some old writing stuff, and I wanted to collect some of the random stuff I've got scattered around across various journals and accounts and whatnot. I think it might be nice to just like... have it all in one place. So from now on, whenever I stumble across stuff like this, I'll just throw them on Dreamwidth, I think.

She feels like sugar clumped in the blood. That's the only thing I can think of when she's telling me she loves me: the wine-purple swell of a limb when the veins get choked up. The bulge of a gut gorged on sweets.

Go and rip a fruit from the love of the vine, though, and tell me how it all works out. I bet it ends up a little like me. Bet it's hard to sink your teeth into, and bitter when you do. Mama never taught it how to be sugary, so it just lays in the grass, in the sun, and gets harder and harder. I bet it smoked in the eighth grade. I bet it never calls you back.

But fine, before you get too up in your high places—watch what happens when you leave a fruit on the vine for too long. Watch what happens when it stays in bed until 3PM, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets and a too-warm body, and doesn't get up like normal. Smell how sweet it is, drunk on the swell of its breast. Watch how it takes and takes and takes and—

Go on and call the smell of that sweet, sugar. Watch how it all rots apart.

You ever seen what's left in the sand after lightning strikes?

They all it fulgurite—an ugly word, and an ugly thing. The knotted remains of something white-hot striking the sand.

I think I was born like that.

See, my mother threw her electric rage at the shore—at the white sand and the dark sea, at the edge between then and now and the pool hustler she'd met at the bar—and found me in the wake of it. Pretty and twisted and writhing out of the ground, fragile and hollow. A fucking gnarled mess that's half centerpiece and half razor.

I'm thinking about the time I fucked you upright in the shower, with gravity holding both of us down like an unwanted third.

That was before Trish lost her job, wasn't it? Back before I caught you with four tubes of Hydros in your sock drawer?

I think you might be dead now. I don't know for sure.

I don't know if I want to know, actually—shit, nobody tell me. After you picked the heroin that night at Keagan's, I spit my teeth out into the cupholder in my truck. I hated the way that they tasted, and we'd lived together there at the end, so you knew how it was—anytime I ate something terrible, I held out the spoon for you.

So no. No, sweetheart, I don't think I want to know what I did that night, because I'm trying to be a hummingbird, all harmless and small. I'm begging God over and over to make me nothing, and yet still, fuck, still—

I am condemned with heaviness, I think. I am doomed to matter.

Take your body to the mountain and find that there is no mountain: there is only a body. Flood and famine, plagues of locusts—there's nothing here, ma cher. There is only you. Miles and miles of you; a complex topography of hills and valleys and gorges. I couldn't draw you a map if I tried. You could not draw you a map if you tried.

You've never tried.

So you take the mountain to the mountain as a meeting of equals, then—haul all your weight up to the Temple Mount and find that you haven't even moved. Go to whatever is burning and ask God what it means to paint blood on the door, now. You are the mountain, cher; you are the plague and the pharoah, you and the locust and the lamb. Genesis was about your birth, and you choose to become a mountain. Exodus, then, is about figuring out what that means. What does it mean to be a commandment? What does it mean to have them carved into you, to carry them home? And what will every else read there, when they look upon God's handwriting in your skin?

What will you read there, ma cherie?

What will you say?