unnamed, uncalled, threaded but unthethered

(adult, they/them)

[aserenesclerosis]

and you came into my life --- a hurricane, a catastrophic flood : incoming apocalypse sudden and unannounced and there were no warnings only : the birds disappeared the barometer falling fast the sea withdrawing everyone knew and i was misreading the silence, ignorant to myself

(and see; storms have names, and categories projected paths cones of uncertainty but no instrument has ever measured the pressures of your presence) and loving you is standing in the wreckage turning over pieces i catalogue future losses, weeks of standing ankle-deep among rotting corpses the carcass of what used to be home,

the mold and the silence.

i count the windows i measure the waterline against my own body i look for survivors and there are none only the remarkable silence that follows after the world finished ending.

(and see here is the first law of catastrophe: the aftermath begins before impact and soon ivy climbs fractured concrete moss grows between the cracks and i remain alive and breathing

inside the disaster and survival never was rescue and we were never meant for interruption

[aserenesclerosis]

and i am walking — unconscious and alone, untethered. your hand has brushed mine countless times, and every time there was nothing. not even the failure of touch a touch so light i couldn't — bear it hand in hand the unthinkable reality of the impossible distance between two skins and your hand passes through mine have i. already died?

and i have waited for you. i have waited for years years i have waited so long and learned nothing

and you walk with such unbearable grace i can't stand it seeing you walk away

(and you keep coming close enough to haunt me with the shape of arrival, and never arrive and i h ate you i ha te yo u)

[aserenesclerosis]

and love is found in duration how long a body can continue reaching into the vast emptiness foolishly aware of its nature (or perhaps there is freedom in abandon: i keep extending my hand. not because i believe you will take it but because my body has forgotten how to let it fall.)

and thus i am a creature of reaching— endlessly hungry for nothing and still opening.

is this prayer?

not faith the refusal to lower the empty hand.

[aserenesclerosis]

II. Cruelty rarely begins with wanting another person to suffer, It begins with wanting certainty. Pain is immediate, the response is undeniable; and a flinch settles questions tenderness often leaves unresolved. Cruelty and intimacy are neighbors. Both ask, "Did I reach you?" but only one mistakes injury for proof, and I, am a fool.

[sweetestcorpse]

Posting art for the first time.

[aserenesclerosis]

Sometimes it angers me, that strange inheritance; that the only love I may receive without resentment arrives as violence.

[aserenesclerosis]

I. Obsession is not the refusal to let go, it is continued perception after the event. The moment passes, but perception does not, the machinery keeps running endlessly. We mistake the afterimage for devotion, the persistence for fidelity, as though the artifact were a virtue, but it is only physics; receptors oversaturated, circuits still discharging, a nervous system incapable of distinguishing between what was, what could be and what is, desires and reality. and thus we forget that eyes continue seeing long after the light has vanished, continuously manufacturing continuity from absence.