SciFi Interlude No.1

A moment of choice; to go with him on the journey we’d planned or… there was no other choice.  The bags were packed and we were seated, secured. He holds my hand.

But I know better.

I know the promise of our destination is not the whole truth. It is the partial truth of a pamphlet followed by the untruth of a presidential address.  His truth is that he is holding my hand, imagining our new lives behind his closed eyes while my truth is that I’ve already slipped out of his hand and am silently escaping.

The makeshift station is too chaotic for anyone to notice one person swimming against the shrieking crush of the crowd.  Nobody asks for the whole truth from me as I disappear.

The earth quaking roar of the departing vessels, one after another after another, for days on end, eventually quiets.  A quiet I’ve never heard before, it having been drowned out by the buzz of our relentless activity.

I try to cry as I picture his face when he realizes I’m not there but my body won’t give water for it.  It’s not him I feel sick for. He is with the others, they have maps and brochures. He is safe and safety is the thing that matters to him most. I am the one who chose not to go.

So I weep for me and for that there is a well that bores through the earth and out the other side. The water is endless and littered with sediment. It filters through my face; first clean and clear then thick and muddy. Beneath that the water is held in stone and can not pass through though it pounds against the inside of my skull to be let out.

I walk.

We had been told that cigarettes weren’t allowed in climate controlled conditions so they were all left behind.  Many had been tossed ceremoniously out of car windows by expectant travellers. They line the shoulder of the highway that leads to the launch site growing ever smaller in the distance behind me.

I smoke and it nourishes me as I walk, bringing focus to my breath. Sleep hasn’t been an option for so long, and without my pharmacopeia of sleep supports it disappears completely from my plans.

My plans. Ha.

I am only a little surprised to find myself arriving home. Certain pathways are cut deeper than others. I enter and am greeted with a new smell. Not the familiar one we slow cooked together over the time of our life here but a new smell, like the one that introduces you the first time you visit someone else’s home. This smell intimately whispers to me that I am the stranger. It belongs to mould now, to dust.

I walk through the detritus of the things I had been tormented to leave behind. They litter the ground and I feel no remorse stepping on them, moving past them without looking.

My thirst leads me to a stream. I lie in it for days, letting it wash me clean and shoulder the burden of my weight.  Little fish break my reverie, nibbling bits of me and carrying them downstream, announcing my arrival before I know where I’m going.

I follow them.

I follow them until they disappear and the water becomes fetid, festering in a concrete reservoir.

I search for another stream and find it. It leads me to a golf course water trap, complacent and impotent.

I experience their imprisonments, their landscaped deaths and concrete graves, as though they are my own.  Like an explorer looking to undo what all previous explorations have led to, I am desperate to find a way back below, behind, beside, before…

The death of every stream leadens my steps,  I could just as easily lay down beside them and let my own blood pool and stagnate.

And yet the promise of… something… puppeteers my limbs onward.  Pulling me along before cutting the strings without warning so that I clatter to the ground on a hill overlooking a river.

Its yawning maw welcomes me with breath both sweetened and soured by the lifecycles within it.  The face of a lover whose reed, grass and wildflower eyelashes butterfly kiss my skin as I am pulled in.

I am carried like a tired child.

The river surges me skyward then sucks me down, a rhythm, a song. Time and memory clash and I feel as though I am back at the station, pushing against bodies caught in a wayward current. I stiffen and sink but the river has a song and I surrender to it, sliding along algae cloaked stones that would otherwise crack my bones.

I drown and resuscitate over and over, reincarnate infinite times.  The blood from my nose gives iron to the riverbed and in return the river teaches my blood to probe toward the ocean.

The ocean.

The salt is the first to find me, carried on the air, offering a feeling more than a smell.  And now smell. And now taste. It is coming and I know She will know what to do when I get there.

The river delivers me as though I am an orphan born into a world that doesn’t want me.  And the ocean spits me back out onto shore.

I try again and She does the same, pinning me back onto the beach so the shells and pebbles can grip me by the tendons, hold me still.

Her rejection breaks me open and I scream her, roar at her. After all I’ve given up in order to be with Her? To stay with Her?  But she roars loudest and my sounds are easily swallowed by her drone. My rage has nowhere to go but down. Down down down to my pregnant belly that rolls and quakes in protest.

Now I understand, the ocean knows it is time, She is the keeper of this kind of time.

I am humbled, embarrassed.

As the realization dawns so does the pain. The child is crawling toward the world. Every inch forward is a battle I fight against myself.  I whimper for rescue but there is no relief coming, the only way through is to push toward the pain and hope to explode out the other side in tact. Or not.

My muscles tear and still I push. My pelvis cracks and still I push. I push out my organs and I push out my eyes.

As they dangle, held by threadbare nerves, the world sways and spins. Through this drunken kaleidoscope I see it emerge. Pincers first.

It scrapes itself into the world, beckoned by a siren song heaving and pulsing beneath the waves.  It has cloaked itself in shell while inside my womb, pulling from the mineral sediment of my veins and now the river of that same blood eases its passage to the water.

She has called forward this glorious monser, adapted to commune with her rising waters. I am the vessel and will feed the gulls with my insides before my use is up.

I thank her,  for everything, and dissolve into dream as the sun flickers out.