by this time stella clearly realized that something was wrong. i stopped, back bent and arched over my caved-in chest, panting and retching. her fingers tightened around mine and she asked me what had happened, so i told her. though how could i really explain what was happening to me? i didn’t know. everything floats out of reach. you never know when the last meeting is going to be. no one knew what they meant to me.
i started to calm down, but by the time i got into the car i was having an incredibly hard time breathing properly and i felt my pulse racing again. let it happen. you can’t fight it. let it happen. the words kept repeating in my head, slowly at first but then faster and faster until it was just a meaningless stream of consonants and vowels, a babbling brook of broken glass and suffocated dreams.
everything got really dark and far away. the brooke froze and then shattered. i was overwhelmed, as if from out of nowhere, with an intense feeling of bliss. it slammed into my every warm cell coming coming coming at the same time and i threw my head back with a terrific AHHHHH as i realized, in a very real way, that it was perfectly okay. everything. if i died right then and there. if i had never been born. it was okay that i had no idea what the truth was, and it was okay that none of this will be remembered. there's just no sense in trying to hold on to anything... fuck me, fuck me you timewhores i screamed. the curvature of space-time was the erogenous zone of the universe, wound inward by gravity, molecules fucking one another so tightly that only the pressure of a sun could give them the sweet release they thirsted for.
HELIUM! HYRDROGEN! DEUTRIUM! i wailed, bucking around under my seatbelt. light must be pouring from my eyes by now, i thought. i could feel the ancient building blocks of the universe transforming inside of me into light and heat. could see see it? she must be able to see it!
stella’s eyes widened, she had no idea what was happening inside of me. she subconsciously accelerated, looking over with concern.
“i just figured out how the universe works,” i gasped, “but i can’t tell you because i can’t hold on to it. i have to let it go.” i told her that sometimes i feel like i'm going to tear myself apart, trying to hold on, trying to figure 'it' out, trying to figure out the puzzle... and now, right now, is a free-fall that happens during a car accident, a moment before the restraint snaps into your shoulder with all the force of a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 60 miles an hour, before the glass shatters and you're staring dumbly at your arm snapped sideways in its socket, and whose blood is that warm and puddling in my lap? coming and coming and coming-- my eyes roll back in my head, i can see the cells of my head, phosphorescent, then putrefying, the minerals in my bones and teeth seeping into the earth, carried by rainwater and gravity and wind, moving across the planet, blown into the atmosphere, dead, i’ve been dead for a millenia already, my mycelial parts spreading spider-web fractal-like through the universe forever until another SPARK! life comes again and flickers off again so quickly, -
My eyes opened, babynew, fresh, perfectly empty. We were sitting in the parking lot and Stella was crying, sobbing rivers of tears and mucous. I had been speaking gibberish to her for what must have been hours, in her time. What could I say to her now? I felt nothing at that moment except the afterglow from having been everything. Life is just this beautiful random spark of exile in an endless silent expanse. When her eyes opened and she looked at me, it was a look I’d never seen. The eyes of a stranger.
“You need help,” she said, and I knew it was her way of preparing to step back. I mean, she didn’t say it then, wouldn’t and couldn’t say it then, but it was her way of saying that something had changed, that she had seen how fucked up I really am under the surface for a long time now but she just couldn’t hide it anymore, and she’d stick around a while because that’s what good people do, but soon enough she’d meet someone that liked the music that she liked, or who talked to her about her favorite band, and pretty soon she’d be washing his underwear and I’d be that asshole that she had tried to save but just couldn’t. It was all so clear. I still felt nothing, except this hollow ache in the spot that I knew i was supposed to be feeling something.
Right then and there I knew that there was no turning back. I had committed to this fate, and had to see it through. Bradley had me on the hook.
And I really had to change my pants, because in the process of following the molecules of my body in their whimsical dance through space and time I came all over them.
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