Dampened

I’m sorry, love.

I lost the words, trapped them deep beneath a stone shelter I forgot I built when first I felt the rumbles echoing beneath my feet.

Here demons roam, saying too little and too much and not enough of the right anything and so I silenced them by burying them deep inside the soil you used the till the earth on which we stand and I, I ruined it long before we had the chance.

What broke in the storms. These are not questions but statements, lacking in feeling, inquisitive without passion, methodical and dry. Much like the wealth of me hidden beneath the depths and I have bloodied my fingers through the nights, digging and digging to unearth what I thought I would happily set down- to find I cannot live without what kills me, cannot breathe without suffocating, cannot feel without screaming. My lungs are tired, vocal chords stretched and cracking.

But she said, in the midst of chaos, I am the most free.

What is a cataclysm that I can hold in my hands, a gentle orb bursting with change, shifting and moving until my body shakes with the force needed to contain a singular blast? Singularity. I haven’t considered the notion of those places where I tend to exist and the counterparts wherein I simply do not in so long, and yet the holes in me are becoming more and more apparent with every breath dragging its way down into my lungs, cloaked and shadowed in smoke and seeping out from my pores. I touch my chest and marvel at the novelty of skin-on-skin, fingertips brushing in a way I hadn’t thought to consider in so long.

In this, I am most definitely human. The softness of touch, the fragility of contact lends itself well to the forms of destruction most natural to myself. The apoptosis of molecular idea crumbling whole networks of thought until the roof hangs suspended in the sky as the foundation crumbles to the earth.

And yet the roof holds, and I am dry where the storms run rampant just past the threshold and the wind blows the water inward, and so I stand very, very still in the center of a floating mass and pray, because I have never known what else to do but pray.

The way before me is shrouded in darkness, and I am blindly fumbling my way through and good god, it’s wet in the rainy season of change. I cannot make it through from here to there without the kiss of water that burns its way into my skin and so I hydrate through osmosis.

If you think the cells of my skin cannot drink the sustenance of water, it has been too long since you touched their surface and felt the gentle shudder rising up from within. I am not so different that you would not know the shape and mold of my skin; it is the heart that you do not recognize on sight.

I am sorry, love, for the parts of me I buried when we found that lightning burns and blisters in the storms and I forget not everyone can withstand the dazzling light of a phoenix reborn. We say it is fire, but that’s much like saying the sun is just a bit warm; it is (I am) still plasma, the kind the blinds when you aren’t prepared. The rush of wing, the raised hackle; I am still me, but I am sorry for the parts that buried themselves silent in hopes that the center of the earth would find itself less damp than the surface.