Sitting in the dark theatre, pressed thigh to thigh with strangers. Someone on the edge of my consciousness is wearing a distinct type of out-of-fashion amber perfume. It makes me feel sick. The bodies twist on stage, the story plays out, the music soars and crashes. It is a dance, a military march, the crumple of a body falling. It snags my heart, like a bramble on a sweater, and tears me open. A wave, and all my hair stands on end. I can feel my arm hairs erect, pressing against the inside of my clothes. The hairs on my thighs rub against my jeans. I am torn open. The music crashes into me, inside me. All the feelings I keep down in the dark pit of me come curling out like tentacles, feeding on the emotions coming in. When I was younger, when I consumed books like a drowning man swallowing water, I thought that hole in me was just a very deep hole. If I kept pouring words into it, gulping and gasping my way through tomes much too old for me, that I could fill it up. That once it was full, I would tilt like a jug and pour it all out again, and drop a single beautiful pearl made from the grit of all those words, my own books strung together from all these swallowed words. As I got older, laying in the dark on my postage stamp bed, feeling the hot hunger that crawled restlessly under my skin, I came to realize it was something else. It was a mouth. A hungry, crying mouth. There was no bottom. There was no jug. There would be no pearl. And if I didn't keep feeding it, it would turn on me and swallow me instead. So I scrape together knowledge. I hoard books of information, many unread, so I always have something to throw. I pull outside emotions to me, like gathering up slippery flapping fish, and throw them into the void. When there is nothing to feed it, I stitch up the hole in my heart and hope the threads hold for a while. A character on stage dies. Lips twist. The mother screams. I cry in the dark, and try to keep my gulps of air from distracting the other patrons. I can feel the fire under my skin, hotter than ever. The hunger, the furious hunger, is so strong tonight. Not enough, not enough, not enough--
Before&After
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