Down In Me

In our hearts we touch gorgeous, slender lithe fingers lightly together and in our souls, perfect heavenly bodies entwine blithely like they always said we would. Like they always wished they would.

Reality is rarely more cruel and unforgiving, not quite as subtle but endlessly more nuanced. In truth, we don’t fit seamlessly like a palmful of sand in your cupped hand, the way we do when I imagine us. Touches rather clumsy but touching, fumbles rather a foible but sweet. I trip over myself and cling to you for support while you trip over yourself and invariably we end up on the sea floor though staring beyond, into the distant horizon. Amid nervous laughter, trembling extremities, and changes of topic we come back around, eventually, inevitably. Letting the tide gently carry us back around to what’s really on our minds.

In our minds nothing matters except the resonance of the other, resounding pulsing waves crashing onto a naked shore. Our brains almost shut down from excitement and lack of oxygen. Our nerves finally calm and inner peace radiates and materialises through the vastness. For a few fleeting moments in our drowning lives we actually believe that we can know something about the deep and dark and everything that dwells there. We finally know the hollows of these coral reefs intimately.

I would have liked to write a graphically detailed admission of the wonder of our shells, the shedding of our wetsuits, the effortless transition from breathing to knowing, the confident mingling of our scents. But to write such thinly disguised lies would be, not only dishonest and disrespectful, but cruel and unkind to our thoughts. So I don’t really want that at all. I’m resigned to disappear in the seas of our minds, where creatures awful in their beauty swim restless but free.

Somehow it is weird that in a weird way it’s quite wonderful. As much as I always want and need forgiving quietude, I never believe I can disassociate long enough to lose my self. Yet, quite easily and strangely confidently, though not completely without apprehension, I did. And for a minute there? Something disconnected and that other something which is something else took over. What was that, anyway? I can never know for certain but I should like to call upon it again, at will.

I knew I’d stepped outside myself as soon as I stepped beyond. Properly stuffed with caffeine and herbal tranquility, a hideous wreck of barely numb twitch and jitter, sweat-soaked from the sweltering anticipation and desirous of something stronger. Once within bounds, I immediately began shedding clues like layers of clothing. Shaky fingers, those that gave me away at first thought.

But soon those fingers were swept away, lost in a breeze that blew its way off and over that which I cannot bring myself to taint and sully with my rarely fitting words. I blinked tiredness into the bright morning warmth and tried to usher in the day and the sense. But the heat reminded me that I’d forgotten who I was, what I was, and even what I feared I’d be for just about long enough. Just long enough to know. Just long enough to realise there’s something wonderfully weird all about me.

I’ll see your ‘hour and a half lying on the sofa staring at an indeterminate point on the floor’ and raise you a half hour hiding in the toilets at work staring at a bowlful of piss.

I am easily misled, mishandled, mistaken. Described as gullible, naive and yes, at times, innocent. (I know. I don’t see it, either.) In truth, my usual instinct, suspect as things may be, is beyond and by far wholesome acceptance. But don’t for a moment think me ignorant. I am decidedly aware of this suspension. Conscious and purposeful because I need to:

Feel that there is meaning still to come
Experience agonising truths
Believe in alien encounters and other far-fetched ideals
Understand that death is more than just stalking me

If I don’t feel, experience, believe or understand (which I don’t), I have a double mind to put a full stop to it all right here and right then, in this place and the other immediately. Sans notes or regrets or regretful notes.

But (beside and besides fear) an intangible lingers. Akin to a thin, imperceptibly silver thread that keeps me connected–no, bound–to the earth and its shepherds turned hunters. So, I will continue to hand you my undying belief, think it over, twist it through and gladly pass it along with all the innocence reserved for only this. I do it willingly, wittingly, I premeditate my immolation.

Partake or don’t, as only you can see fit. But go on, in all and any case: push me down the rabbit hole and take me by surprise.

I’m feeding off you, as I know you are me. I feel you, eating away at me every day, piece by piece, morsel by morsel, incisors dig deep in my flesh and further. What’s behind? What’s within? Echoing whispers intimate in my mind. You thirst for wells of knowledge of me the way I’m parched inside of you.

I want to climb right into your mind. I want to set up residence in your nightmares and explore every far-flung corner of your subconscious. I know some of the darkest mainly monochrome. But what about the others? Do you dream in shades of aquatic blues and golden suns? Are things in their place, a place where everything should be?

I have to tread lightly, though. I don’t wish to disturb a single ridged leaf in the shivering windswept, overgrown greens. Death defying to know what it feels like to be you from the inside. I want to ride out the storms in the dark hours of night and float high over clouds in your words on the light hours of dawn.

I want to know what it’s like to see everything through your unique, exacting eye shapes and colours. Invade you so completely that our synapses set off fireworks in the purple blaze and begin to hardwire together, enmeshed.

Driven by a strange desire but I would not allow myself to change you. Come as you are, bury your grace, deep within me.