The last time we slept together in one bed, you told me you had a dream that I am covered with fish scales and that you try to take them off, but there’s just more and more underneath. Like slow poison, the self-righteous lunacy of your words fills me up to the brim and will eventually take a toll on my weak constitution: perhaps I was a shapeshifter all along.
Yes, they are frightening, words. Once they have left the mouth, they cannot be returned; they cannot be swallowed back into nothingness. Without realizing just how much they bind, people continue using these chains.
Yet another contexture opens up an old wound in me, and she in turn becomes a window into a new world—this otherworldly place where nothing menaces, but everything is hostile. I touch concrete on a summer day and can feel the heartbeat and breathing, pulsation. I reach down and touch the pavement. It is breathing. Its two-toned heartbeat makes my clavicle vibrate. I can feel it; I am suddenly, irrevocably certain that the earth is breathing, and I know that the city is riding the back of a giant monster. I know this more clearly than I have ever known anything before.