Time was the big bite of a blue whale when I realized I was dying. I could feel it, the shriveling of my cells, a collapsing of lungs, a haziness of the present, an almost pleasant release.
In the water in the whale’s mouth, I am drowning in memories of yesterday as in 5 years ago, 9 years ago, the very beginning of time. I am crawling violently from my mother and I speak the words, “It all belongs to me”. She cackles and I screech. Together we are best mates riding through villages of sour lemons and sweet mangos. She massages my shoulder and kisses my forehead. Her love shoots through me like being punched with a bouquet of sharp gilded roses. There are tiny cuts all inside me. Sometimes I pretend they do not exist. Sometimes they don’t.
In the water in the whale’s mouth, I am battling viciously. In between gulps of air which are days or decades, I ask myself “Why are you fighting the tide?“ I have never had an answer. My siblings are slices of peach cobbler. Over the table, we are yammering stupid jokes about an ugly dog we saw on the way home. Their howls taste like cinnamon on porridge on a cold day. I always need it. We exist as arches in feet running barefoot in the grass, kicking a ball, shoving, giggling, loving. Each instance of joy shared is an imprint on my spirit. I express my love to them through laughter and kindness. They meet it with the same.
A big gulp of seawater is really just the chunk of time with me and him. As in the great love of two spirits sewn together by delightful gold threads of reciprocal acts of tender fucking love. Simply put I am rubbing his chest as he hums and we melt into a puddle of serotonin and sex, LOVE. He is the persistent kindness of a listening ear and a supportive shoulder. He smiles and I am in the hands of Hevioso about to strike the earth—electrified. He pulls I push and we flip, a gymnastic routine of lovers over years tumbling, rising, and landing. The landings. Hmph, the landings.
Well, we learn sometimes landing is hard in the water. In the tub in my living room, I am pushing real hard; he is submerged behind me. His body is a wall holding me up as I push more into the water straining through teeth I expect to crack any breath now. He tells me we are “two whales in the water—top of the food chain”. I grunt and my body bends into his body as I push again.
Then there are three of us. Then there are four of us. We are a family doing the family dance—a floor routine. We are a family of gymnasts tumbling, running, jumping, twirling, attempting to stick the landings. Hmph, the landings. We are synchronized swimmers perfecting the art of creating art with our bodies submerged in water. And the time wave slaps me again and they’re old and gone. The house is a whale graveyard and the decay will last over a decade. But, this is also a new birth of self. This is me already dying.
The ceiling of the room is a dark blue which makes me sad. I feel him next to me holding my hand. He is whispering something to me. He smells like sea salt and warm breezes. His face is a brown haze layered on the dark blue of the ceiling. There I see two blue whales twisting around each other. One’s jaw opens wider and wider.
Time is the decay of molecules across a period. So my death is really because of time. And maybe I shouldn’t have drank so much, smoked so much, stayed up so late, skipped those doctor visits, and so on, and so on, just water filtered through the big mouth of a whale. The past, the love, the tension… “Why did I fight the tide?” I still do not answer even as I fade into the darkness of the jaws of time.
So many parts of this make me uncomfortable. I like it.
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This one made me hungry and question the nature of my existence at the same time. It's a lovely experience reading your works
Beautiful writing.