July

Breaths that Break to Become

The dance becomes two. The music blurs and shrieks. It's now that she doesn't feel alone, something has tugged at the air by her chest to announce it is here.

The room is full. It is full of silence and a presence that floats to her like a bottle thrown at sea, coming, coming, and coming until it finally stops by her throat. It never lingers, comes and goes like a word said and done. This time was different. It made her feel happy, a maddening happiness caused by a presence she couldn't see but only feel. It threw her head backwards and opened her up until she was nothing but billows of laughter that carried and carried her somewhere far above the ground.

She expected to fall that night, but she never once did. The pleasure became undone, stretching as far as the night and bordering on pain. The presence intensified, rising like water from the ocean right to the peak of her lungs and standing there – there, right at the top of her colourless grief and for one breathtaking minute crushing it.

She promised, promised to the curtains that never stopped flapping and the air that felt like knives to her skin, that if this was life, she would start living. Then she promised to her feet, hair in mouth, that if this was death, she would start to die.

The drums of the night carried on in the backlights of her delirium and she felt her breaths slowing, slowing, and slowing like a sun setting.

And then she was gone.  

Sometimes they mold together, unhappiness feeling like happiness and so on. That's when life feels like a show hijacked and you suddenly don't know whether you'd like to see the ending like you came to, or leave. That's when the dance becomes two. The music blurs. And you shriek.