Comets

These past few nights have been nights of movements that were not circular. This was odd, you'd admit.  Because you've been chasing your shadow in circles, around and around you've chased after yourself in your head for so long, you thought the indentations your feet made on the ground would be your grave, you would be buried standing up while still chasing your shadow in a circle. Or so you feared. But these past few nights, you found yourself making movements that undulate. You found yourself feeling moved, maybe from shear desperation, but this feeling of being moved, it started with what you think was a memory.  A missing, perhaps.  Like when you miss something, or some body, and you couldn't let it go. It kept clawing at you, left a hole in your throat.  You spoke, but the voice was not yours; it came from a machine.  Everything was distorted.  Your reality was synthesized. Discordantly.  It didn't fit.  Not quite right.  It was as if there was a tear between time and space, and this room that you were sitting in, this bed, even this body, none of it could have been real, none of it felt real.  There was another existence, another reality residing somewhere, something that resembled your memory, the one that you couldn't quite remember.  So you became angry.  You felt like smashing things, or yelling, screaming, throwing things at the wall and seeing them shatter.  Because you were sure this memory that you could not remember, it was stolen from you.  Somebody must have stolen it. Took it from you violently.  Maybe they took it when you were sleeping, when you were young and didn't know better.  Maybe it was when they lied and said we were playing family, and to play family you must play mom and dad and do mom and dad things to each other.  Maybe it was when they said family doesn't tell on each other.  Maybe it was even earlier than that. Maybe it went way back to the moment when you were forced out of your mother's womb because they said you were a breech, that you posed an imminent threat to your mother's life so they forced you to come out, pushed your body back and forth until they found your feet and pulled you out.  So you came out premature and screaming, screaming screaming because you weren't ready, you weren't prepared to leave that place where you were safe and full.  But you had to come out anyway, and it made you angry, so angry you kicked and screamed but nobody understood.  You weren't sure which one of these were the moment of that lost memory.  But all of this, all of this maybe, it didn't figure until much later.  At first, you were just mad.  Pissed. You didn't know why, you just knew you wanted to punch somebody's face.  You wanted to see blood.  You wanted to destroy.  And then you thought, this anger, it was just desire.  Like when a person is an addict and she's in need of a fix.  Her whole body screams for it.  She's not real, her body is not hers, she is not herself, she is nowhere, unless she has that fix.  All she is, is just need.  Screaming, dark, destructible need.  She can kill for it.  This body, whoever wants it can have it, if they can silent the need.  It is not hers anyway, this body.

This was why you drink.  You drink to fill the need.  Except it didn't. It just appeased the need so you forget that you have become its slave.  You poor bitch.  Poor wasted bitch.  

The good news was, at least you could still dance.  It was amazing, when you dance.  It was as if in the turning and contorting, your body became yours again, and for as long as you remained dancing, you and it belonged together as you needed it to be, and you loved it as much as it loved you.  Soon you began to sweat, you were so happy  you could cry.  As you moved your tired limbs and sagging breasts to the music --what kind of music you didn't even know, didn't even care-- you began to cry, tears rolled down and mixed with your sweat, and you loved them, these tears-rolled-sweat, because they came from your body, precious body that was for this moment entirely yours. You couldn't, didn't want to, lose any of your self, so you raised your arms to your face and licked the sweaty beads swelling on your skin, so you bent down to suck back into your self the tears that have rolled down your chest.
 
The funny thing, perhaps less funny and more saving grace for you, was that when you dance and lick yourself like that, some people pay attention.  You know he did.  He whose name you did not know, had never spoken to, but who seemed to always be there when you dance, always within your point of view.  You didn't talk, didn't attempt to speak to each other.  You made eye contact, and for you, maybe for him too, that was usually enough, being seen by somebody was usually enough to confirm your existence.    But tonight, it was not.  Tonight, when you looked up and saw him, saw his eyes on you, you decided you wanted more.  You needed more.  Like waves in a storm, your body crashed its way towards him.  You stood in front of him, very close, so close you thought you were suffocating, which meant you've done right. You breathed out a sigh of relief.  He didn't speak, neither did you.  It was so dark in the room you could hardly see his eyes.  But you could see the sheen from his pants.  You reached your hand out to touch it, you realized you were touching his thigh.  You could feel his body vibrate beneath your fingertips.  Maybe your movements have moved him, or maybe his body had always vibrated like that.  It didn't matter anyway where it came from, that vibration. It belonged to you now.  You stood your body close to his, put your face against his, not because you wanted him but because deep down, you secretly wanted to die.  In your mind what you really wanted to do was crash your body into his, this body that won't be yours for long, that would cease to be yours when the alcohol wears off, you wanted to run it straight into this other body that was quivering and waiting for you, and you imagined death to be like a collision of comets, an event that would lead to the scattering of your self in a thousand directions forever.  Forever.

You smelled beer and cigarettes on his breath.  And lust--it smelled sweet.  It smelled like need.  You smelled it on yourself too, and that made you smile.  Maybe I will die tonight, you thought.  You walked out with him, and secretly hoped that tonight would be the night you become comets.