Heart and Lungs and Water

I’m thinking in colors, movements, shapes. I’m lost in a feeling that I don’t feel but it holds me heavy, wrapped. I stand even on the balls of my feet and I feel my heart beating so hard my whole body is vibrating. A swirl of astounding love, obliterating indifference, fierce pain, shuddering empathy, and physical heat. My grandfather is about to die. I am in love. I am as lost as a rat stowed away a ship across an ocean. The fear is so fierce I can barely breathe, but it’s hanging on the tonguetip of ecstasy. My hoodie sweatshirt is Franny and my black Navy beanie is Zooey. The ring around my finger is a promise to a world detached from me in the voimen, but which I love and promise to die for. Around my waist is a blessing from God, Allah, and I have never let it leave my sight since it was wrapped into me. I’m all-powerful and invincible. I can’t be touched with a look nor brought into disgrace with a blow from four steady knuckles. I can’t be swayed from my determination as I am a child wrapped up in velvet covers held beneath a womb. I am everything and so very local. My heart is swelling like I can’t describe and yet it’s swelling through dimensions that analysts, dry bland and blind, still debate the existence of. I can end a sentence with a proposition and can propose my own laws of grammar while I am at it. I am inspired. The Holy Ghost whispers through me but I can only feel it organ deep. Meanwhile, the water rises. Meanwhile, they shuffle and make plans for the future and worry about getting to work on time. I haven’t slept in a week, my hands and eyes shake, my innards are working overtime, I’m not sure what I have or have not eaten. I can’t think of her for the life of me and that brings me the slightest tinge of sadness that all the misplaced guilt and illfired hopes were all just dust in a decaying studio. My heart goes out…It goes out and it does not come back, except the next morning, hungover, and covered in lipstick. My heart is larger than the world I inhabit, but I can’t touch it. It holds a sway more real and more terrifying than any I’ve ever accredited God with. But I know that they are synonymous and that makes me just sick enough to be totally confident.

I will fall. I will fall and there will be no one to catch me but my own toldyouso expectations. I will climb up, broken and reach out in the dark. I will feel nothing but the steady hiccups of my own growing laughter. I will let it all go. I will torpedo my ark and stand atop a column for 8 years, 8 months, and 8 days. And I will hang my head. I will moan in a Parisienne bed, while light streams in ivory through the windows, and she will whisper to me, ‘le petite mort’ and I will slowly shake my head and say, ‘le grande mort.’