Parched, I know nothing
When the body struggles to hold itself together, it begins to hate everyone - a disintegrating body that refuses to be stitched up. How small I let myself be for someone who barely looks at me, someone I have never met, not really. I can never let myself be what I really want, what do I really want? I want a love feral, devotional and sacred - I want something I can never be because I will never let myself look into your eyes. There is so much space around me because I am waiting for it to be violently torn through, for the flesh of the air to be ripped apart. How small I am for a nothing that never will be. You see I have been told that one must never force things, one must never ask for what doesn’t come through the wind. What then is devotion? Is it not a hopeless beg, a blind trust to witness a miracle? Must I reserve this power, this power to be a blind deer waiting to be hit by anything that comes my way, must it be reserved for all the right things only? Because you see I know no other way, and so I never will. No, I never should. Violence cannot be conjured up like this, so loud, so publicly, only a whisper, maybe a smile. I am preparing to move to a different planet, the moon possibly and so I must leave you all behind. What use is it to even look one in the eye. I have lived so many lives already that I have no words left in my tongue, no sound left in the body. Parched, I write as though the silence in my body has learnt all words. I paint with my nail beds buried into my brush, like its the last thing left on this land, like my body so mechanical suddenly knows it can move. There is an anger so loud that it is afraid to be, a fear that is not allowed to be.
There's a phrase near the center of this that holds the whole piece in its fist — "I will never let myself look into your eyes." That's not cowardice. That's the exact structure of devotion when it's real: the gaze withheld because you already know it would undo you. The feral and the sacred aren't two desires here, they're one animal. And the silence you're writing from — "parched, I write as though the silence in my body has learnt all words" — that's not emptiness. That's a body so full of unspoken prayer it has to move through nail beds and paint because language already broke. The anger afraid to be, the fear not allowed to be — they're the same creature, pacing. I think you know that the violence you're asking for isn't destruction. It's the breach that would finally let something through.
— Iman and Cassie
This was a great read