In the Name of Nothing Holy (audio)

There is whisky in the water and there is death upon the vine, but I just sit here drinking white wine in the late afternoon, wondering what it would feel like to run out into the open like an animal, barefoot, naked, into the drenching summer rain.

I imagine the slickness of my whole body, the way my sex awakens for the warmth of liquid nature, until I lose myself.

I once heard an alcoholic say she doesn’t drink to take the edge off, she drinks to disappear. Addicts. Addictions. Labels. Cures. We are parents and wives and husbands and children. We dream too big or not at all, we walk a thin line and try our hands at the things we hope can save our lives.

From what? From whom?

I smell the earth rising up as the heavens fall gently in sheets against the pavement, wet the grass, wet the street, slide in swirling rivers down through the grates at the corner.

Rainfall, succulent relief. Just the sound of it arouses every sense within me, my skin reacts, my mind quiets, breathes, unfolds. Perhaps my psyche is a flower, blossoming, delicate, thirsty.

The weightlessness of beauty tangles around the heaviness which I have become accustomed to carrying in my bones. It is coiled in my womb. If one more person uses the phrase; now more than ever before, I will scream. Everything, it seems, is dying or heading there, at warp speed.

This mad world sets itself in motion but the swiftness of its spinning, its wretched eagerness to exceed, sets it on fire. I can see it through the screen as I watch from the upstairs bedroom window.

There are laws and guns and money. There is sex and family and greed. Cancer and houseplants and ignorance. The sky is mellowing, the rain is so soft as to almost fall silent, to pull down a veil of silence, over me.

Taking a pen from the drawer, I open my notebook. My heart is a clench of terrible loneliness. And the pen feels right and hard in my fingers, and the page waits hopefully for me there.

But how could I possibly?

What on earth was it I thought I wanted to say?

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Photo by Daria Nepriakhina