It Comes in Waves

[malins]

That’s the routine now.
Rinse and repeat.
Rinse and rinse and rinse again until the skin cracks. (We could see what was underneath?)

Repeat.

Six days of catching barely a nap, head on the hard bench, deep livid marks etched into the face.

Everyone is tortured this season, in body and soul.
Deservedly?
Who can say.
Probably, someway, somehow, yes.

Six days a slave to fate, six days chained in the hopeless galley.
Oars beating futile, struggling in the maelstrom.
(Now my foolish boat is leaning, ... should I lie with death my bride?)

After each six-day war -- a day off, to collapse into dreamless sleep at home.
A home that had become a place of mold and abandon.
More an impact site than a refuge.
Shelter is nowhere, truly.

Somehow staggering through the PANS checkpoints on the way.
(Forgive them for they know not what they do.)

Dreamless sleep.

She would awake not knowing where she was.

Mistaking the world, thinking it should be what it had once been, like it had been always, like it had been for the quarter century of her remembered life … a world of war and peace, of hopeless fighting in the streets and blissful fighting in the sheets, of travel and talks and learning; and then of sanctions and bans and yearning.

A world that had been changing, collapsing, re-forming, resisting … but now all that world of the past was one, all the same -- because there could be only the world before and the world after.

And she would never ever ever wake up again in the world before.

Dreamless sleep.

She would awake …

--

She awoke, not knowing where she was.

She had been carried off, while asleep, to a strange place.

That was something she remembered from childhood.

Taken, while asleep, from bad places to safer ones, carried forth by those who loved her, long blanket-wrapped drives (Let me enfold you, here I am waiting to hold you),
... half-heard murmurs of worry, care, concern
... but also
... that firm certainty
… oh half-forgotten father, forgive me ...

... but then, that one time it had been the other way round
Taken to a bad place.
Which had been the first secret she’d known to keep in the heart, buried forever.
More so because she couldn’t trust herself that it was true, that it even had happened, than for what had happened.
(Or had happened not. Tell yourself it didn't. Tell yourself but don't tell.)

The strange place this time, was a bombed-out church; she guessed something left over from the strife around the time she’d been born.

She’d seen places like this in the provinces where there was no money to clean things up.

Then, when over and done with childhood, she’d come to places like this.
For breathless moments; in coming she’d felt brief, hesitant guilt.
But old hate crumbling was weaker than young blood rushing.
Which was a hopeful thing to think was it not?
Desecration! – Had it not been glorious? – Guilty and glorious, it had been.
(One could not be without the other, when it's me, she'd understood ... that's what being me means, she'd learned).

This time though, awaking not knowing, grasping to ground herself, she knew right away, this time she’d been taken to a bad place.

And it was going to happen.

This time, it was definitely going to happen.

 

[malins]

The ceremony was accompanied by the wind howling its fugue through the blown-out windows.
A clergy clad in hazmat ministering to a congregation of the living dead.
It can’t be happening, it can’t be real, it’s got to be a dream. It’s my brain’s parody of the institute.

In dreams we fly, in dreams we die; in dreams we're free to see the farthest lands … but she couldn’t remember, from dreams,

... smelling things like this.

The residual monomer aroma from the plastic films with their flimsy often-failing promise of protection.
The fumes of disinfectant, and the death-vapor never quite covered up.
The just-rained-upon rock-smell of the roofless ruin.
That pungent, telling whiff from the crowd.

The crowd wanting blood.
You will never forget that once you’ve been there.
Planned as a peaceful protest it had turned into that, that horrible day on Liberation Square.

Blood-lust.
That scent would always shoot urgent alarm into the senses of a prey-beast.
Prey like me.

There is no fight so it is flight?
But she is held firmly, in the most un-dreamlike way.
Blood backing up, painfully pulsing from the vise-like grip.

Blood.

It will be about blood.
Blood and breath, until there is blood bubbling, pink froth upon the breath, hissing gurgling from ground-glass lungs, drowning and then breath no more.

Prey like me.
A sacrifice like me.
There’s one thing missing from this mockery and that is the Savior suffering on the cross.
Where He should be, worthless me shall be, and that will make the mockery complete
(Because I don’t even believe in god!!!)

The roar from the crowd confirms.
Twists and turns, to no avail, she is forced down.

Head thrown back in the roofless church, eyes to the sky … seeking salvation?

The hate-star rules the heavens.
It has grown so fast, it looks to her naked eye now as it did in the SN 2020 space-telescope pics a few months ago.
Filaments of gas expanding at near the speed of light.
It could not be so big when it is so far away?
Ghastly beauty, pink orange red on a backdrop of mother-of-pearl.
The dominant tone reminds her of ethidium bromide under UV.

In its death the star showers Earth with caustic rays.
Frying, biting, ionizing, mutagenizing.
It is dead already, it died seven hundred years ago but it reaches from the grave.
To tamper with our nucleotides.

In the light of the vanishing star, the sacrifice is brought.
Because that is in the blood.
That is what you do when plague stalks the earth and strange signs stand in the sky.

 

[windar]

It is dead already, it died seven hundred years ago but it reaches from the grave.
To tamper with our nucleotides.

I love that line. But then I would...

 

[lukash1296]

Cryptically wonderful, as always.

I really love your way of misleading us into thinking this would just be another roman slave story, a galley ploughing through the ocean waves in the distant past, only to slowly reveal what intricate world you once again created with an increasing number of technological oddities one wouldn't expect. Then the finale, connecting back to the equivocal waves of the title, but this time in form of the electromagnetic radiation that caused the world to fall back into the past, just brilliant. It feels complete, though I'd love to read more.

 

[malins]

a galley ploughing through the ocean waves in the distant past,

Much of the human condition is timeless, people stepping up to fight against insurmountable odds while still haunted by their own self-doubts and failings. There will be more and from chapter 4 onwards it will get somewhat less cryptic

 

[Loxuru]

The hate-star rules the heavens.
It has grown so fast, it looks to her naked eye now as it did in the SN 2020 space-telescope pics a few months ago.
Filaments of gas expanding at near the speed of light.
It could not be so big when it is so far away?
Ghastly beauty, pink orange red on a backdrop of mother-of-pearl.
The dominant tone reminds her of ethidium bromide under UV.

In its death the star showers Earth with caustic rays.
Frying, biting, ionizing, mutagenizing.
It is dead already, it died seven hundred years ago but it reaches from the grave.
To tamper with our nucleotides.

Betelgeuse?

 

[malins]

Betelgeuse

Got it!

The actual consensus among astro-people though seems to go in the direction, that the recent dimming phase does not necessarily mean it's going to blow up right away (or rather, has blown up sometime around the era of the Black Death, so that the light of the supernova would reach us soon)
... but in astronomical terms 'sometimes in the next 100.000 years' is pretty much the same as right away ...

in the scenario of this story it did happen, later in 2020, it was a bit more impressive than expected (there seem to be considerable discrepancies in estimates how massive the star actually is, maybe if it's way at the top end of the estimate... it would be more short-lived and give a bigger bang)...
... and the radiation from the event may have caused interesting mutations ... not in humans, but in smaller, rapidly multiplying spreading genomes ...

 

[Eulalia]

Wonderful - your writing reminds me of the magnificent closing part of Basil Bunting's 'Briggflatts':

Young flutes, harps touched by a breeze,
drums and horns escort
Aldebaran, low in the clear east,
beckoning boats to the fishing.
Capella floats from the north
with shields hung on his gunwale.
That is no dinghy’s lantern
occulted by the swell—Betelgeuse,
calling behind him to Rigel.
Starlight is almost flesh.

Great strings next the post of the harp
clang, the horn has majesty,
flutes flicker in the draft and flare.
Orion strides over Farne.
Seals shuffle and bark,
terns shift on their ledges,
watching Capella steer for the zenith,
and Procyon starts his climb.

Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm
places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.

 

[malins]

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.

Utterly unknown to me, and I had to look up what a 'slowworm' is, it's what we call a 'Blindschleiche' in German, an etymologically misleading name as the 'blind' does not derive from being unable to see, but from 'blenden' as in how bright its reflective scales are.

Anyway, ... 'The star you steer by is gone,' ... that is a must-steal line. I shall correctly attribute it when I do so ...

... it fits in too well to be wasted, with this character, from another of my meanderings, who's definitely lost any star to steer by, ...

On the cusp of the hill she lies looking up at the velvet of the night, strewn with the riches of all jewels.

Never has she seen as clearly as in this moment.
Diamonds, rubies, blue sapphire and golden topaz; the crimson garnet that is the fulcrum of the celestial sphere.

The only gem the sky lacks, is the one of her eye, the emerald.

Each gem a slowly pulsating disc, expanding, until they freeze, and fade.

She lies spread out and pinned.
The raptor folds its wings.

 

[Eulalia]

Utterly unknown to me

I think it would appeal to you, Malins - this New Yorker article is a good account of BB and his finest poem

The Improbable Life and Prescient Poetry of Basil Bunting

A new edition of his poetry may help reintroduce a writer once hailed as the successor to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

www.newyorker.com

He was a very musical poet, very attentive to sound and rhythm,
his own reading in his soft Northumbrian accent is hauntingly lovely,
even though it's a 'difficult' long poem, every time I read it I find new,
vivid images and evocative phrases

 

[malins]

I think it would appeal to you, Malins - this New Yorker article is a good account of BB and his finest poem

The Improbable Life and Prescient Poetry of Basil Bunting

A new edition of his poetry may help reintroduce a writer once hailed as the successor to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

www.newyorker.com

He was a very musical poet, very attentive to sound and rhythm,
his own reading in his soft Northumbrian accent is hauntingly lovely,
even though it's a 'difficult' long poem, every time I read it I find new,
vivid images and evocative phrases

I shall go and find some time to steal to read & listen to this properly!

 

[Frank Petrexa]

Wonderful - your writing reminds me of the magnificent closing part of Basil Bunting's 'Briggflatts':

Young flutes, harps touched by a breeze,
drums and horns escort
Aldebaran, low in the clear east,
beckoning boats to the fishing.
Capella floats from the north
with shields hung on his gunwale.
That is no dinghy’s lantern
occulted by the swell—Betelgeuse,
calling behind him to Rigel.
Starlight is almost flesh.

Great strings next the post of the harp
clang, the horn has majesty,
flutes flicker in the draft and flare.
Orion strides over Farne.
Seals shuffle and bark,
terns shift on their ledges,
watching Capella steer for the zenith,
and Procyon starts his climb.

Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm
places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.

If Betelgeuse blows up, as some expect to happen fairly soon, then there will be something to steer by.

 

[malins]

If Betelgeuse blows up, as some expect to happen fairly soon, then there will be something to steer by.

Well in this story, it has blown up, it's become the 'Hate-star', and while it is tempting to do so, adopting it as your lodestar will guide you only hellwards...

 

[malins]

(3)

Should I cry, should I beg, for mercy to be given, for madness to be stopped?
Cry to the hell-become heavens, plead with faceless mask-men, talk back to the choir of the living dead?
Unspoken but known, the condition for mercy would be for me, to not be me.

Expert hands, trained to deal with and dispose of dangerous substance, took control.
Having been forced to her knees, she’d accepted her submission.
Now raised again, not of her own accord, but by their will alone, she was to be seen.

Raised to be seen.
Lifted to her tiptoes by powerful grasps, picking her up from under the armpits.

To be seen, to be viewed by all; so - with a resounding echoing rip ... away with the nightgown.
That had been on her, when stolen from sleep.

It had not hidden much but it had been her only protective layer.
A thin layer to counter the cold.
Flimsy against fate.

Her body now fully revealed to devouring gazes, sculpted in unearthly light.

Incandescent oranges, phlox-burst violet and painful blue, perverted pink and crimson – the garish palette of the hate-star, that with bold, broad strokes had repainted destiny and obliterated all earthly shades, all the modest hues mere life was made of.

Do not gaze at the face of a God.

That is not how they’d said it; they’d talked about how all the short-wave rays would cook out the retina.
(never mind the melanoma but that would take decades to show, was there anyone in this world still planning for more than next week at best… ?)
(Take care when viewing, just as was the rule in the lab when you stuck your electrophoresis gels under UV.)

And yes, it was a God, if you called Jupiter sky-father he was worth a mention no more; what was the vanity of Venus or the wax and wane of the Moon herself against a hundred-fold brighter Lord?

The Sun alone, still could enforce his most simple rules.
But his seasons only watched as the foreign lord laid his law upon the land.

When the virus had first struck, it had taken mostly men, and mostly the old.
When the second wave came, the world was ready, so it thought.
Girded for battle with vaccines and ventilators.

Then attention had turned to the sky, orbiting space telescopes where the thing for a week or two, and not transmission electron microscopes.

The star had first dimmed and faded, then suddenly it grew, tumorous and terrifying.
People had become accustomed to shifting baselines though.
Things growing five-ten-fiftyfold, then a thousand and a million-fold.

But when the new ruler of the sky had done his work, with ultraviolet, gamma-ray, and a bestiary of particles that sent off all the superconducting supercollider scientists to rend their white coats, … the rules had changed.

Epidemiologists soon noted that the risk group had almost perfectly inverted.

But far too long it had been left unsaid, that what had been a lung disease, had become something else.

Oh no.
“Mistakes have been made” “things have been left unsaid” – how she had always hated those passive, evasive statements.
When they tried to squirm out of their responsibility in some press conference.
They?
Someone chose to to not warn.
Someone chose to not say.

In the first wave, why not warn of pandemic much earlier?
Why not admit that even if your country couldn’t make enough masks, it would still be best for everyone to veil up a bit?

In the second wave,
who had known first about the change?

People like us.

No, don’t deflect.

People like me.

And that’s why it makes sense.

For me to be here.
For this to happen.

That’s why I’m not telling myself anymore it’s a dream.
Now that I know where it’s going.
Not trying to pinch myself, to get myself to wake up...

It is going to hurt a lot more than a pinch.

 

[Loxuru]

The radiation of the exploded Betelgeuse spreading death… together with a terrestrial viral pandemia! Apocalyptic!

Meanwhile, did anyone watch the morning skies, when dawn was nearing?



A gathering of all visible outer planets.
What more omen does one need to explain a pandemia?

 

[malins]

Well okay I promised by chapter 4 it would get less cryptic.
Whatever. Trust in promises and prophecies at your own peril .. and wait for #5 - nevertheless, this is all perfectly explainable by way of rational analysis, which is what the "Erlebende" of this madness will be telling herself ...

 

[malins]

(4)

An electric tingling all over the body, exposed to cutting cold, eyes of ill intent, and the foreign light of the dying star.

As of yet, none had touched her bare skin.
It had been plastic-enveloped hands that fastened her – her, the poisonous thing.
It was protection-suited priest-figures that now stepped up to perform a spellbinding choreography.
Grouping up into lines on the church-floor in a well-rehearsed dance.
Going through familiar motions … a dramatized version of the PPE degowning sequence she’d learned by heart, with all of the rest of the team.

Soon, there would be skin on skin.
But not face to face, ....
... for where masks came off, there were further masks beneath ...
... smooth silky and black this time, elegant but still concealing.

Is it masks all the way down?
Like peeling away layers of an onion?
Somewhere down, must be a true self, a deep core.
Something best not seen, shocking when revealed,
... like the pulsar at the heart of the new-born nebula,
... "degenerate matter", fervently spinning.

They stopped and raised their fists to the sky.
To show their sign of supremacy.

Some other countries had dithered about ‘stigmatization’ …
… but round here, the Provisional Authority for National Salvation hadn’t had any qualms about tattooing the immune status right on people’s wrists.
A lot of people had antibodies against the original strain by now, but very few were immune to the neurotropic variant...

… these were the double-immune, who feared the touch of none.
… the ones you’d send in nowadays...
... when you needed wet work done.

Their lines parted to make way for the Master.
He revealed Himself majestically, claws bursting forth through the gloves.
Then slicing and splitting the covering from head to toe.
Stepping out.
Releasing a pungent scent of apex predator, to make prey-beast go slack.
Underneath, an alluring perfume, a pheromone of power and promise, intoxicant and incapacitating.

Predator claws ... but also horns, hooves and tusks … Baal or boar-man?
The massive torso unmistakably man though, also the muscular abdomen and the upcurved member, rising further with every heartbeat.

Whichever God this is, nameless and timeless, He will be doing it.
No temple has ever been raised for, or consecrated to Him … He takes them all by the ancient rite of conquest.

Conquest.
Pressed down on the waiting beams.
Beams eager to hold her.
As she was already held, transfixed by the gaze of those watching.

She’d been led down a descending flight of stairs, she realized, so that now her pose was not flat on the back, but sloped forward.
Better to be worked upon, and easier to raise her when that moment came.
And better for her to see Him.

And ...

Her arms drawn back and up and stretched and flattened out.
The acolytes’ thumbs pressing down hard.
Behind the joint of her wrist, between the bones.
The pressure sending a strange numbness into her middle and ring fingers.
Fearing, but knowing, expecting.


The Master stepped forward, wrapped the claw-tipped digits of His left hand around the middle of His right …
... grasped firmly ... tensed the entire body … and pulled.
Pulled out the claw. The nail.

It is a simple law – symmetric, good and right… His holy right to inflict pain is bound with knowing pain.

And, all the hurt He would cause her, would be done with His body alone, and what came forth from it.

Silence fell.
All who lived, held their breath, it seemed.
No sound except for the gliding of skin on skin now, many hands roaming over her.
Some firmly gripping, some cautiously caressing.

Fingers, palms, nails … circling and contouring, pinching and probing ...
Surrounding and enclosing her, the heat of their bodies igniting her own.

Eyes closed. The sweat-scent of raw desire and her own arousal.
Never so aware before, of herself being flesh, being a real thing, being entirely a thing, her existence focused into that vessel.

To be touched, to be taken, every curve of her body defined against those pressing hands …

... boundaries begging to be broken.

 

[phlebas]

The radiation of the exploded Betelgeuse spreading death… together with a terrestrial viral pandemia! Apocalyptic!

Meanwhile, did anyone watch the morning skies, when dawn was nearing?

View attachment 843023

A gathering of all visible outer planets.
What more omen does one need to explain a pandemia?

The chances of anything coming from Mars
Are a million to one, he said
The chances of anything coming from Mars
Are a million to one, but still, they come

Well okay I promised by chapter 4 it would get less cryptic.

Less cryptic?

Eyes closed. The sweat-scent of raw desire and her own arousal.
Never so aware before, of herself being flesh, being a real thing, being entirely a thing, her existence focused into that vessel.

ok well that is pretty raw, but do we know what is happening yet? Does she?

 

[malins]

(5)

Hands all around. Pushing down on her shoulders while her wrists were still firmly held on the beam …
Shoving her down the rough wood, scraping her skin and stretching out her arms until they could be stretched no further.
Her head falling back with a sigh, accepting her helplessness.

More hands with a firm grip around her ankles now, placing her feet where they belonged, heels right beneath the buttocks.

Others pushing her knees aside and down.
Opening her up completely.

This is how they’ll nail me down.​

In expectation of Him she arched her back, offering herself in the most archaic gesture.

Electric shocks as fingertips coursed over her breasts, realizing, this now is the touch of His hand, tracing paths of blood, sacred spirals leading inward ...
The power and the privilege, of being chosen! Being His! Being the one!

Fateful symbols painted on her skin, burning, marking, sinking in, irreversibly dedicating her.

Then, the thumbs pressing down into her wrist relented for a moment, briefly letting blood flow into her numbed hands.
Tingling in the fingertips.

​

I should want to touch something one more time ... touch Him perhaps I would beg to ... but … I am no longer one who does, I am the thing that is done to ...​

Their dull pressure was replaced by the prick of sharp tips.
Against that same sensitive hollow.
The skin such a fragile membrane. Eager to burst.

Hands over her eyes.
Now she dared open them, lashes brushing against their palms.
Dull red, the evil eye of the hate-star pulsed through them.

Certainly impossible!​

She knew what was coming next.

Inescapable!​

There was a brief resistance in her mind, an incredulous voice whispering … insisting ...

I can’t be getting crucified with demon-claws in a devil-church​

this can’t be real it’s ridiculous. I am a scientist. Such things do not exist ...​

only a few hours ago I was running sequence comparisons at the Institute…​

But what could be more real? The strongest sensations ever.

​

Be still you nattering voice of self-proclaimed reason that has always tormented me!​

This is the moment! Live it! Die it!​

Hot and cold, shivering, goosebumps, raging fire … a pulsating heat approaching between her widespread thighs.

Take me, do me, do it all, leave nothing! Tear through me! Split me apart!​

Waves and waves and waves upon waves breaking over her.

As the merciless invader pushed in. Taking what was His.
As spear-like claws sank in -- serrated blades scraping between her ulna and radius, twisting and augering their way through the flesh.
As He thrust deeper and deeper, pushing far beyond were any mortal would go.
Tearing tissue with the ease of parting floating gauze, violating the innermost sanctum of her womb.
As the claws exited the back of her wrist, briefly lifting the skin off the flesh and pinning it against the beam, until it too was pierced, and the spikes split the fiber of the wood. Biting and sinking in.
Twisting and bucking, the back of her head banging against the post.

Spasms and shudders, fire and blood bubbling in the center of her being.

A new life seeded onto this world.​

Son of the Hate-star.​

He shall be born of the death of the world before.​

Born not of nurturing womb, but of the broken vessel.​

​

Utter sacrifice.
In her most violent convulsion, her legs broke free for a moment and she wrapped them around her conqueror, willing to drive Him even deeper, to envelop and decorate him with her melting, parting, yielding flesh.

Time stands still as stars collide. Senses fail.​

Then He is gone.
Bitter cold where His heat had been.
All the hands slid away.

She would be offered to the New Lord now, raised up to welcome the new ruler of the sky.
A dizzying ascent as the cross was erected, almost as being flung from a catapult into the void.
As the wooden beam stopped against whatever foundation was supporting it, her body continued on with the inertia of the rapid raising … throwing her hips out into the void and tearing the wounds of her nailing.

She had barely registered that er feet had been placed back against the side of the post and fixed with swift, brutal efficiency.
But now as she tried to balance herself, as she strained her muscles, an pushed … now she knew.

Now she knew it all.

Rise and fall.

Time stood still and time sped up, as forces far greater than her willed it, tearing at the very fabric of space-time.
The pulsar, heart of the hate-star, forcing its frenetic rhythm onto the conquered world.

So much time, one moment or an eternity…

Oh but now I can see everything at once.​

All the things I’d ever lost and all the things I never did and all the lives I never led.​

​

Oh Master, I could live my whole life in the time inbetween each beat of Your heart! ​

​

Futile and frenetic.​

Fighting despite myself.​

​

...​

​

Am I doing this right?​

​

...​

​

Let me have one more breath.​

One more try.​

​

Let me have just one look ... just before You turn and go.​

​

Just once without the mask.​

Just once the full glory.​

Oh You are ... perfect...!!!​

​

...​

​

Am I doing this right?​

“It comes in waves”, ​

​

the knowing woman had said.​

To her sister, as she lay pale and panting, gasping, sweat-cold and shivering.​

“It is always like that”, she’d said, “it gets worse and worse and you think you can’t make it.”​

“I can’t take it anymore”, her sister had said.​

“That is the wave before the last. That is what you think. That is what you think right now … just before you push through.”​

“You’re almost there. Just one more time”, the midwife had said.​

“Just look me in the eye right now. Trust me...”​

​

​

“It comes in waves”, ​

​

the knowing man had said.​

To no one in particular, as he pondered the graphs, head-scratching and muttering.​

“It is always like that”, he’d said, “it gets better and it eases up and people think they’ve gotten it under control.”​

“But we do have it under control”, the minister had said.​

“That is the calm before the storm. That is what you think. That is what you think right now … just before it comes roaring back.”​

“Don’t take my word for it.”, the professor had said.​

“Just look at the numbers. Believe me...”​

Rise and fall.
Again and again but then it ends.
Just one more push and you can break through.
It’s a matter of breathing.
It’s about in, out. It’s about finding that point, that moment.

Get the rhythm right.
Get the breathing right and then one more push and then you break free.

But it hurts so much!
Of course it does!
Anything that’s worth it does!

Blood and breath.
Blood bubbling.
Pink froth upon the breath.
Hissing gurgling drowning and then …

Let your bones step out of your flesh.
Rip your skin open and then you can break through.

Leave behind the shattered empty hull.
Let it slip away.
The broken vessel.

​

Rising now as darkness falls, rising as a gossamer thread of soul, passing outward through a thin pore in the membrane.

Rising toward the silver spinning disc at the midst of eternal blackness.

You stupid, you’re dying and all your brain comes up with is this light at the end of the tunnel thing?​

And anyway can’t someone turn off that damn throbbing sound? ​

Leave me alone all of you. ​

I want to sleep. ​

Go away.​

I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe

​

Of course you can’t you stupid but then why would you want to anymore?​

Because…. ?

(Credit: Image by Paintausea)​

​

 

[Jollyrei]

But it hurts so much!
Of course it does!
Anything that’s worth it does!

But what is it worth? It has been asked what life is worth if you live forever but lose your soul? What is this worth, if it takes your life? What is being taken? What is being given in value?

Perhaps it's in the struggle, however futile.

Very evocative writing, as always, and with layers of possible meaning.