backwards

stones. 

stones in my gut stones in my mind stones in my fingertips, sliding over the keys

it's temporary, yes, it's adjusting to the meds, yes but doesn't mean it's not real, reality, it's too heavy today tomorrow too, saturday fine! then we taper up next tuesday and such stones, 

granite and such, time, such time they will need to erode but--

disappearance is imminent. wait till saturday again. wait.  wait.   wait.  don't fall in the mean time. you're quite heavy like that.

did i mention the haze around my face? 

yes, it's the color of an overcast sky seen through winter-salt stained windows. it attacks like gnats, supposedly harmless, but then, in your mouth ears eyes, stumbling about, do be careful, won't you?

harmless then?

in one desert there are stones that move on their own. 

they never let anyone watch. they own their own movement. 

can we still call them stones?

not the ones they've put in me, no. grey. lifeless. they do not even have thought to move. i started out swatting the gnats but i've grown too heavy, the stones spread like infection in my blood. 

fingertips are the next to go. 

see you saturday when it's all well. 

an xmas jumble

the child-one cries. her brothers make her cry. it's xmas eve. i am an only only but i do not think that's supposed to happen. or that i'm supposed to bring her a tissue. 

which i would have.
which i don't. 

instead i eat a second piece of apple pie and play with my baby cousins. they giggle over squash and fall asleep face first into pie. 

i am liking this separation. family on the eve. solace on the day. 

i woke this morning early before the cars to the uninterrupted silence of snow, from here cross the park where the boughs hang heavy with white. 

the absence of sound.
the softness of light before dawn. 

you have to get there before everyone does, with their loudness and dirt and shovels and interruptions. paths through the plain. i have always wanted to see the english moors. like unending snow, no footfalls, no evidence. 

you exist without existing. 

still. my first private blanket snow since i came here. the universe gives me the perfect present. i am grateful because the universe is trying to make it right, me being in this city that i hate. 

all right, i say to it, i thought you failed me but you are making it right. you do never fail. we have an agreement. i thought you broke it. i thought you balled up my chi and chucked it out the window somewhere roadside to rot. 

now if everyone will stop telling me the same thing. 

private things kept private. the hawk i see, you don't and i keep it to myself. the soft rose moors of snow in the early morning. writing. whatever your tears were about. widdershins private. i make you keep it yours. 

i do not bear the burdens of your brothers.

private thought: is my perception of my aunt and uncles right, in the way you make me believe? gaslit is such a trendy term. has your paranoia created how i see them despite what i see, child-one?

i have no siblings. i have no one to ask. 

then again i have no one to fight with. 

but my perceptions, are they my own? if we have the same eyes then whose are in my face?

next

by the throat, you know, that oldest cliché. 

it's the safe one this time not the vampire. 

it's just all of them. there's two, too many

time ticks off the hours on my watch

i'm standing on a water tower bent over the railing pushing the acid around in my belly thinking of the fall. the end would be fine. but what about the fall?

why am i writing such drivel and crap? 

because there's too much, you know that. 

i've started the driving anxiety dreams again. haven't even gotten the car yet. 

that respite, six-month clear sleep,

gone gone gone gone. i'm flipping the car the car is orange the wrong color, it's manual and i can't drive. it is the same make and model and it does not run the same. 

paresis of the mind. 

i cannot even talk to my friends. i should be, i can't, i feel tears, there's tears, 

the intertwined convergence-monster is toxic, it seeps into my blood. 

black and sticky. oil. oozes out through my fingerprints so i am silenced. i can't have words. sticky phone.

there is the safe one and the vampire and they are separate but they are the same. the girl with no ears knows this. i have yet to learn. it sucks out my breath because she is not the safe one the way i thought. a renaming is in order. girl with no ears, help me. what is the not-safe's name? there is no name without understanding. without understanding there is no defense. 

paresis of the chest. the diaphragm stops. it is susceptible to shock, and thoracic-diaphragmatic breathing triggers tears. no wonder i have never breathed. 

i did not fall asleep as a child terrified i would just stop breathing if i wasn't controlling it. stare at quilt on my wall, inhale, exhale, trial of not-controlling. confirmed. an autonomic function too exhausted to keep on. vigilance. i must not sleep to stay alive. 

i'm thinking i do not think i was wrong. 

i'm terrified of this drive. i will delete this part because it is shit but the convergence monster for two hours and two hours of the not-quite-safe one without identification of where the unsafety lies. i will be too tired to sort it out. 

i'm not sure of the question now. 

in which the story asks, but?

but what if the girl does have ears?

does she make different choices?

she still feels, she still smells, she still touches, but she hears words. words bite and sting and are invisible tentacles that worm in through the nose up to the brain and do not die. 

with words, the vampire choice is now easy. she does not see him without the safe one there. he avoids, he does not suck, when the safe one is there. 

she does not stay with the vampire alone. there are no escapes and it is generally important. 

but words, words make the safe one different. the safe one feels of caring and compassion and need. but the need has words. the need speaks of the vampire. the need speaks of their entwined seams. the safe one does not understand about seams.

the need is implied beneath words and inside words. the safe one asks for help and camaraderie. the girl who did not have ears did not hear this. the safe one was safe.

but now, now it worms into her brain and it does not die. 

how is the safe one not always safe? she says.

she was never all safe, i tell her. she stares up with pearl tears and pulls me to her from the weak sun. she is mired in the place of the beginning home, in the place of the weak sun, and she has ears and she does not understand and she needs me. 

i understood when i lived in the land of sun, she says. the safe one became safe when i lived in the land of green, when i got my ears but i did not understand how to hear. i am here under this weak sun now and i do not understand. 

listening is the same as feeling, i say. you understand harmonics and sharp and soft and noise. there is the fundamental frequency, which is the words, and the harmonics, which are the other meanings behind the words.

but the worm words, she says. ears don't have blinders. why don't they? i can't stop it all coming in. vampire acts like i expect and with words that match his thrums, but sometimes he says opposite things. safe one says loving things and commiserating things but then words that sting. i do not understand. 

not everyone is safe or unsafe, i say. everyone has harmonics despite their fundamental frequency. vampire has the nostalgia frequency that is so seductive. you have learned that one. 

but, she says. 

i don't understand this one, she says. 

you must listen to all of the frequencies. 

you mean the one that has need? she says.

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i hold her in my autumn sunlight, in my weak winter sun, show her where to sever the seams and watch her learn to listen. 

in which the answers are chosen

this girl, she has no ears, raised by books. they drown out the thrum. she closes her eyes. Everything That Rises Must Converge. flannery o'connor. she felt the pulse, the hum of the South. 

Somebody Else's Problem. douglas adams. he understood the absurdity of the universe. everyone wears blinders. everyone has a choice. 

she sits up. it's cloudy today. but it's humid and that makes her warm inside out. she was born with the thrumming inside her head and too many stitched together seams and she took care of the thrums in the beginning house, she nurtured them, they were part of her. but they're grown now. in the land of sun she severed them, let them bleed, now it's time to go. everyone has a choice. everyone always has a choice. 

do you know what it means, she says to me, to always have a choice?

i cannot answer her. i would've said the same anyway. i am fading.

she has broken things. she will not apologise. she has made a choice to make all the choices one at a time. she chooses to choose again ad infinitum. 

she has no ears but she feels. she feels the thrums and what they mean and she does not hear the words so she can choose, and she can choose, yes or no, when to leave, when to stay, when to disappear. 

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