Tectonic (Alternative love letters #2)

Dear....you.

Try not to screw up this this letter. I know you've just realised its my handwriting and already turning the paper into a crumbled hen, some unrelieving stress ball at the doctors office. This letter is not target practice for your trash can. Just read this once before you hold it over a flame.

There are certain tides I cannot resist.

It's those tsumnanis which I stand still for. They encircle my ankles and drag me into the calm of the cold and the arms of the deep. The internal shift that drags one long fingernail down along my spine, lurking as an awkward, pretty shadow. I wrap myself up in it, content with silken promises, curious to weave lies. Even now, after so long, it lingers like an uncomfortable hug and I am unsure whether to let go or press harder.

It's here where I'm free to relish my increasing state of decay and so I do. I become my own turning hourglass of liquid mortality, red mercury floating on the surface. I wake in the morning and my coughs are full of powdered bones... my tectonic plates colliding under the surface. It changes me in ways that scare me, destroy me, excite me. I am willingly suspended in it's silky dark, a salty prisoner pickling in the rapture of misery, immune to the screeches of gulls and the hallowed calls of the outside world.

I'm sorry I did not hear you when you called for me.
As you can see, I was busy.

Of course, like all things, it is only for the now. The worm cannot stay cocooned forever. The floods will eventually recede. The horizon will suck back the blue, and it's this scene of destruction that scares me the most. These moments are the ones that will damage me, and they have. Bloated corpses and broken wood, blue lips with swollen tongues, some deathly landscape I created, to which I think I belong. Your bleached bones have found their way there, nestled between grey foam and the backbones of cuttlefish. I picked the flesh off them myself.

The tides turn, the winds change, and all that's left is my exoskeleton, hanging from the underside of a leaf. A cicada's shell, a snake's skin, some lost keepsake. The water may have skilled fingers, forming my outsides into something more circular, more solid, than a wobbling mass on a turntable -- but you were more than an artist. You could have plucked me from the silky dark. You whispered through the earth and my green coils unfurled through broken clay...you poisoned the unforgiving weeds when they tried to strangle my fragile roots, you tore through the thorns with your boots.

And I was an epic cunt.

Yours in empathy but not in sanity.


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