I felt an overpowering need to be alone with something impossible to name. It had hands clutched full of the flesh of silence which multiplied without end. There was no one in that place. Everyone had left and they had each pulled one of its doors shut behind them. I was very alone. It was very dark, it was very peaceful, I was afraid. I was very afraid it would end and that it would never end. It was womanlike and dim, a love that could only breathe you out and breathe you in this way. It could only flower in solitude. It would only expose itself one to one, face to face, mouth to mouth.
A mysterious union which was without need for bodies, it was body-less. Forbidden and yet met with an almost primitive expectation. The pain and terror of all the world rested its head in this place.
An apex. A resuscitation.
It was a life invading itself where death had long been its only comfort.
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I have carried the buds of a thousand gardens inside of me, many lifetimes have I been caressed against my will. I have produced and offered the milk and the honey, the fire and the water and the abuse. I have been unable to bloom, longing to encircle my thick vines around the precious feet of the marbled gray daylight. All I want now is to be alone with this unknowable thing and to let it feel me, I want to feel inside of it with my tongue, with my fingers, with my body and blood, with my consciousness and my subconsciousness, in waking and in dreams, to penetrate it with the poison which consumes me and give it a punishing pleasure. I want to stretch into its glistening web and learn to obey the strange fluid rhythms of its body-less pulse.
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We speak too loudly and too often. We are murdering something which cannot leave. I cannot bear any longer to sleep outside of it. There is a place beyond this one, it lives inside. It hopes no one will come to the door. It hopes no one will understand its words, it wants to close in around itself and return the light to its tomb underground. It gives birth to its own time. It chews its own limbs and destroys its own space. It wants to make love to the darkness and water its wings with the tears that fall like petals from the last sighs of the last stars. It is perpetual. It does not name what it wants.
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Allison Marie Conway 