𝙸𝙽 𝙰𝙱𝚂𝙴𝙽𝚃𝙸𝙰

𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝙷𝙰𝙳𝙾𝚆 𝙲𝙰𝙼𝙴 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚂𝚃𝙾𝙾𝙳 𝙸𝙽 𝙸𝚃𝚂 𝙿𝙻𝙰𝙲𝙴 𝙻𝙸𝙺𝙴 𝚈𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙳𝙰𝚈,

[unrebirth]

BY VENYA: 21+ / MULTI-MUSE / MULTI-MESS

@UNREBIRTH is a private, highly selective mutuals-only writing blog. Heavy / potentially triggering themes may be present in some of the writings that can be found here. Do not interact with posts / follow if you are a non-mutual or personal account.

GUIDELINES. MUSES. DIRECTORY. [ WIP ]

[unrebirth]

paranoiaspoisondoor​:

something in him wells up with force– unstoppable by nature and hell, maybe he wouldn’t halt it if he could. nausea overtakes him, forcing slow breaths. saliva fills the space between teeth and gums, gums and cheeks, tongue and throat, until it’s overwhelming. he needs something– a cigarette? no, he hasn’t taken more than a puff in years. a drink, that’s what he needs. something to loosen him up, to take away the tension that’s built itself up in every muscle, every tendon, every inch of his skin covered in goosebumps. he can hardly pry open his jaw to speak.

“I–” a pause as he gathers himself, “I want that.” and that’s about all he can spit out before the wave crashes. his brows furrow, lips pressing against each other and tremble. the look on her face is too sweet– too willing to be kind to someone who doesn’t deserve it. the tears flow slowly at first, combating the fingers of his free hand that so desperately try to wipe them away before they can be seen.

he can see his mother– that same gentle look in her eyes as she tucked him into bed. his eyes trail over the stitches tracing up her septum. she can’t smile, maybe from the pain, maybe because she saw her attacker in every feature of her son’s face.

a spilled glass of milk was what did it today. a simple breakfast– silent, but that wasn’t anything new. eli had grown used to thick, humid air in his lungs whenever his father was around. the smell of aftershave blended with cheap pomade to form the scent of an angry man. he can’t remember what his father said, but he remembers seeing broken glass and the dread deep in his stomach.

he said i’m  sorry back then, too. idle fingers picked at the scar on the back of his head as he tried to hold back tears then, too. he felt useless then, too.

eli can’t look at caroline anymore. his eyes find anything else as his chest knots itself up into a mass of overworked flesh– it seems useless, right now. if it can’t keep up, why beat at all? finally, he settles on staring at their hands.

“That’s all I’ve–” and he knows he’s about to lie, “–Wanted for a very long time.” years spent wishing, wanting, praying to feel her next to him again flash through his mind, but above all else he knows he does not deserve it.

What did he look like, for each time she’s seen him?

Shoulders broadened too early, tempered by a tenseness she hadn’t witnessed, but saw how the weight of it settled in their curve. No sudden movements. Always at attention to something that might strike at the slightest hint of inattention. How his closed hands had to learn her open hands, that in them, there would be no palmed proof of something to shield against.

Her eyes caress his face– the damp flit of her eyelashes trailing ink lines, tracing hues from memories that blot underneath those draught weary, sweeping planes. No longer muted from the distance of sight, bodily vivid from this renewed remembrance of him, and altogether so unbearably stark with familiarity like knowing that a swelling would turn into a certain bruise. She’s reminded too that the knowledge of pain tenderizes a wound even further, and from inward towards the blood-glow nucleus of its hurt, touch could become a mutual but unequal conduit of painfulness. This knowledge is always an inevitable secret too, because pain can only bleed into language so much to be heard, so she encases his secrets in the gentle gauzing of her gaze. 

Caroline understands. 

(I don’t hurt you any more than I know you are)

Still, there’s the bleeding, still, the impulse of touch restrained at the tips of her fingers, still, like weeping must to a wound, like the always reliable honey in folk remedies. Still, and still… 

She softens her gaze from looking so much when tears begin to slip from the scabbed grip of his being, and lingers after the staunching attempts of his fingers. “Eli…” she calls his name, tender as ever in her mouth. As if asking for permission. Uncertain of the boundaries of what she’s able— what he’d allow, so calling his name was maybe only as much as knowing the name of such hurts would do for it. 

He looks away, and the eventual snapped thread of sight faintly stings against the sore skin of her heart. She doesn’t fault him for it– if she’d consider it a fault at all, and lets the self-salve of understanding soothe over the unintended lash even before he spoke again. 

(You won’t hurt me any other way than I know)

A momentary silence settles, and murmurs away beneath the slight rustle of the bed sheets as she cautiously inches closer to him. “Eli,” she calls again, a softly beckoning announcement of her intrusion this time, certain at first, then hesitant again when she pauses her movement. Her hand returns to his once again, carefully insisting its touch in a loose hold. “You know, I have a lot of time for that.” another pause, as her hand begins to familiarly settle again, feeling the cold of his skin to sweep her fingers over, as if to warm what it could in reach.

 “I’m still here, because... I want to be.”

[unrebirth]

paranoiaspoisondoor​:

his own words echo in his head, replacing images of an empty apartment. you didn’t do anything wrong. it leaked out without warning, without consideration as to whether or not he believed himself. he thinks of reddened cheeks, blood pumping in his ears, wet eyes, and desperate text messages sent to anyone who would listen. david’s voice rings in his head alongside his own– a desperate conversation with the worst in mind.

you tried checking her workplace? friends? how long’s she been gone?

the scent of vomit and citrus cleaner. rotten food, untouched in organized containers. trembling hands. an empty crib just a room away from an empty bed.

she hasn’t answered my texts all day. i called her phone, her work… i can’t get in contact with her or anyone who knows her.

and for a moment, eli can blink away the tears as he sinks off into another world. his eyes fall on her hand– an olive branch, he thinks. but should he take it? should he allow himself to weaken even further? sitting in a hospital bed, inadequate in every way, and he can’t even man up enough to say you were wrong. his tongue dries up in his mouth, impotent to form the words that should be said.

i thought you were dead. you did that. you made me think you were dead because you wouldn’t talk to me.

and then she says i’m here and it’s back to reality for him. the lump in his throat forms itself faster this time, saliva building up as his eyes meet hers. He can’t say those things, because he knows what he did.

“Thank you.” a pause. his mind is empty and his fingers are clenching at the blanket he was so neatly tucked into.

“I’ve missed you–” the words come out crumpled, like letters thrown away in a wastebasket by his desk. “More than anything.”

That’s all he can manage to choke out before his breath hitches, holding back a wave of god knows what. Another pause, longer this time as he remembers his father.

“I’m just so goddamn sorry.”

Her hand remained, earnestly resigned to the answer of its offering. Loosely open, an unfurling of petaled fingers that asks, or waits for its possible fate of becoming a flowery gesture that in the end, could only mean its wilting. Her gaze trails after his, retracing the lines in her palm that ends in the margin of her hand, stopping at the hospital fluorescence scorched borderlands of touch — a distance measured to his hands that a faint, instinctive flutter of her fingers react to. As if she could draw the line further, pull on its threads, like she had once— when distance was once only a girlish shyness just at the tugged hem of his shirt.

When her hands were lighter to carry all that it could, when younger, it's the hands that move first– a topography charted from crawling, so all of the world was in it. When she hadn't outgrown them yet.

Now there’s a frayed rope bled of that fated red, and her hand is only a hand. What was it then? Calculated grasps along a will that unraveled from the same rope. Bearable pains shaped into a rigorous hope from the knocking of the knife on the cutting board— a counting down coda to a lonely song of domestics. Routine falling into the light steps of rehearsal, footsteps overlapping from the kitchen and the bedroom, a concentric domiciliary dance. Goodbye, she circles the dentist’s appointment on the calendar in red, I love you, she washes and dries the sheets, goodbye, she puts away the last of her bedside clutter, I love you, she puts away the last container in the fridge. I loved you, she closed the front door behind her.

Leaving behind a scene of absence, a broad daylight darer on the front page if this was a crime— it didn’t make her as bold as one, only that she wasn’t a liar, so it still meant the certainty of her guilt. It hadn’t been as bloodless– guilt coagulates, bright in her throat and still wet in her eyes when their gaze meets again. He thanks her, and she allows a brief, muted smile, still faintly glad of that though her hand remains. She rests her breath against his pause, waiting.

I’ve missed you—

Guilt again, its apprehensive fremitus beating in the same chord as her heart, straining against the soft collapsing of the ribs. Distantly, the desperately insistent hum and glow of a phone’s screen reflects in the sheen of her eyes; how lonely it had been even before, how lonelier still after without triumph– her escape, his abandonment. How it could be said of either of them–

I’m just so goddamn sorry.

— An overlapping arterial arc, her breath hooking after his.

It’s Caroline’s turn to gather the silence, leafing wishful imaginings of some other times before this moment where they could admit to each other. When maybe she would be stronger than now. Now, she could only be honest, braving nervousness and gently placing her open hand over his own clenched hand.

“I think.. we have a lot to admit to each other.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, her eyes affixed, limpid pools of confession, and the dark of her eyelashes shadowing over it a look of a long while of kind consideration. A while of it spent downturn, counting out her pains and his. “You’ve... hurt me,” her breath draws sharply from the tender blow, “But I’ve hurt you, too.” she pauses, feeling her hand settling over his. “There’s still a lot to say even after saying that, and I… I’m telling you this because I want to. Because-” a deep breath ripples throughout her chest, her eyes glassy again.

“I’ve…wanted to forgive you for a really long time, now, and,” her thumb brushes over his knuckles as she draws her hand away to where it was, palm down on the bed. “I know I have to ask that from you too.” she glances at her hand, and looks at him again, “If you’ll… let me.”

[unrebirth]

paranoiaspoisondoor​:

his stomach has begun to churn with the knowledge that this is not a dream– finally, it isn’t a dream. she’s here, in front of him, speaking in that soft voice that he’s thought of so many times before. his hands come together, nails running under nails in a nervous gesture. give him an hour and you’ll find bloodied cuticles– little marks of boyish thoughts.

and then she says those words and all he can do is stare. for too long, he stares, wishing nothing more than to find the words to encapsulate years of thoughts. years of silent apologies. of wishing he’d said so, so much before that day.

“Don’t apologize,”it’s barely more than a whisper, “You didn’t–”

recipe cards flash behind his eyes. an empty apartment. phone calls, late nights, drinks on his bedside table. shaking in his hands. he‘d thought the worst when it all happened. he remembers the moment that the truth set in– she was gone, and all he had left was a quickly fading set of footprints she’d left around the apartment. his jaw clenches.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” the first thing he notices is the way his voice shakes. then, it’s the slight blur in his vision. the mild sting in his eyes as the bags under his eyes swell. “Caroline–”

he feels the quiver in his lower lip and suddenly, he can’t speak anymore. he holds his breath, desperately waiting for the moment to pass. to be able to speak to her, to reach out and tell her i’m so goddamn sorry. to mean it.

the shake in his hands has become visible as he gestures to the corner of the bed. a deep breath flows through him involuntarily– a sharp pain giving an excuse for the tremble in his voice.

“Can you sit with me?”

It’s bittersweet in her mouth, this yielded fruit of honesty. “I’ve really-” a sharp breath lends its honed rise to a quiet certainty, cutting into the bright rind of it, “-really, missed you.” She didn’t repeat herself to beckon him from the threshold he stares at her from, but it was a willing relent to the meagre relief of unearthing such roots. To admit because it is so late and the earth of it is still on her fingers while she stood there, just beyond the opened screen door he stood behind, on the toiled garden of time. Then finally— 

You didn’t do anything wrong.

The already welling sheen over her eyes seeps from hazel shores, finally overflows in tides, waves of them gravitating towards the blue moon pull of his. Her tears tenderly enumerate the silver times that have been lost between them – the gleam of it palely emanates from her face – and patter onto empty hands in her lap while she looks at him from the unchanging coast of memory. What she couldn’t speak fluidly confesses what she couldn’t bring herself to say to him then — everything she’d done to wordlessly say goodbye.

Neatly folded and ironed clothes, his desk tidied where everything should be, the filled fridge and its calendar so hopefully marked with appointments, their bedroom bare, and the baby room emptied so it was no longer decorated with the promise it hadn’t been able to bear... 

Wane silhouettes of someone who was mostly half turned away from memory’s yearning eye and drawn from longing recollections flicker in between her blurring vision, and coalesce into the visual present. His face forward and opaque in shades of pains, unbearable in its bruised vividness though her gaze remains affixed—  then he calls her name. 

“I’m sorry,” she feels the need to repeat, and muffles the instinct by slowly wiping her tears, a distractive gesture by lending her fidgeting hands something to do. “You’re here, hurt, and I’m-” -not helping you being like this, muted by her own jagged breath after his. “Of course.” she manages a faint smile when he asks, and carefully moves to sit on the bed. She takes a deep breath, slightly leans closer, and an open palm gingerly offering comfort places itself between them. 

Then she whispers the first promise she had ever made to him— 

“I’m here.”

[unrebirth]

MEAT

ME: It's after I've hacked into you that i section your meat like a cleaver would. I couldn't be a butcher for this reason, but I know meat takes to cut, and that's all you need to be a cleaverer. I take your hands and put the fingers on wrong but I know your palms. I take your feet but the stumps don't take to the too gnawed joint of your once ankles. I took your throat but the uvula and the tongue are minced into the same hapless meat. I only knew your mouth from the pinked pearls of your broken teeth. Don't you think I know you enough from being able to differentiate these shorn you-pieces? Don't you think I know you because it's enough that i can hold all your meat and can say that it's you? Don't you think you know this because you understand?

YOU: Of course I know. Why wouldn't I understand my flesh. You only name me by my meat because you want the anatomical relief of me surviving your cuts. Still you can only ever call me meat.

[unrebirth]

1.

To you, absence is an opening. To a somewhere, to a nowhere, for something to bleed in or seep out of. A noise that doesn’t answer. A perpetuated hypothesis. An emptied placenta.

When you were born, your mother was a theory, in the way children without mothers suppose them when they're able to clasp around her silent premise. For a child like you that doesn’t know where she became from, the conclusion is that you were born alone.

The thesis of your mother is always changing. The first woman you remember taking care of you had hair that stopped to her shoulders. Dark, straight and cut to a blunt at the ends, strictly practical rather than fashionable and so Mother had the same hair. You remember her plaiting your hair once, and saying your hair is growing longer than hers. After that, Mother’s hair grows longer and longer. Another woman you remember had wide cheeks that would swell red from the everyday tug and pull of your non-siblings, generously upheld by her patient smile, so you imagine Mother with the same lovely ruddy cheeks. You remember her brushing your cheek once, coldly supple from an onset seasonal flu, and saying you looked pale. After that, Mother's cheeks were fever tinged. The last woman you remember was tall, though all adults were at that age, she hovered over the rest of them and wore her height with the stern gracefulness of a tree. Mother became taller too. You remember her crouching down, gathering you in her arms, and saying she will miss you when you leave for your new home tomorrow. You felt small in her spanning embrace. After that, Mother began to wither, paling into a child’s mystery. 

Mother became a superstition. Mother is a lithe figure, her face always hidden, the glimpse of her elegant neck rosy, and the long, long dark hair ribboning behind her is a hint to her beauty, the color of it shifting under the perpetual spring sun of your childish imagination as she skittishly skulks around the trees of your dreams like a brindle shadow. 

After awhile, you don’t dream of Mother as much. When you do, she moves about wildly among the tall trees, shrinking into the distance, amorphous, diffusing among the phosphene stars beneath the night sky of your eyelids. Mother becomes a myth. You learn to call another woman your mother, so you eventually become from someone, and you are someone’s daughter.  

When you first came home, there was a cat. Its round face affectionately ragged by the years before you into a fuzzy brown circle and its dawning all knowing eyes have settled into lazy crescents, flickering a cloudy gold every now and then like an aged, feline oracle. He liked to hide away for naps, as if the dark corners he burrowed into would lend their shade to the nights of his dreams, overlooking a field you imagine he leapt about in- a weary back leg intermittently twitching to muster a once kitten’s vigor. He goes missing one day, and hours into the afternoon, your mother discovers he’d crawled under your bed, and passed deeper into his night.

Sometimes, cats go away to a safe place to hide in when they get sick, your mother says as she consoles you. Then did Mother go away because she was sick?

The next day, you were blanketed in an intense fever. Though you were prone to illnesses then, it was not a lapse most sensitive children gave into, and you were seized by an unfamiliar spell. The week that you were sick hazy, and the hours felt like in-betweens, the halved days melding together. Reddened like a newborn and wrapped in bed. You felt like a dry wound, and the atmosphere of your fever dreams were gauze-like. 

You dreamt of Mother. Her endless hair flaring after her like untamed outgrowths, darkly swooping plumages winging her small body. She had abandoned her slipping grace to instinctual movement, barefoot and darting past the trees, like an agile creature-woman.

2.

Absence is a punctuated question. When someone announces its presence, they are greeting it with a farewell. When it’s said, however synonymously - loss, absence, disappearance - they only incomplete the finality of their enunciation. Only. 

The only word you spoke to your son was ‘hello’. Or was it only a sound you made to him? You cradled him in your arms, weighing him against your chest, and hoping he could hear the sound of your heartbeat. Could he? You think of him sleeping, his little chest resigned to shallow breaths. His dark hair slick against his pale skin, his cheeks and mouth a budding, promising red, and entirely stark with life. His finger would not curl around yours. You cover his face with kisses and tears. My poor, tired, lovely baby boy. 

When you became a mother, it was through loss.  

There are common causes in cases of stillbirths, a doctor says, and you hear nothing else that follows. You do not know why your son had died, or what complication or indifferent disease had swaddled him away from your arms like a scurrying nurse. You don’t want to know, or to remember, because it would mean allowing the disease to replace the name you had given him.

You can choose how you want to say goodbye to your baby, you eventually hear. Maybe you had looked confused, and you’re handed an open pamphlet, ‘cremation’ and ‘burial’ staring up at you as if it would prompt an explainable answer. You don’t understand, you had only just said hello. 

Your parents come and stay with you for two weeks. You need help, you heard your mother say, to you or to your son’s father, you don’t know. But you know that a child can be a handful.

Absence follows its own internal logic, so you go into yourself.

You would not speak, and as if attempting to gesture the most conventional form of well meaning, your son's father brings you a basketful of apples, placing them on the bedside table. I love you, he says, just as your father would say, just as your mother would say. Strangers say. You would not eat, so he cuts up an apple, and barely a slice teethed into, you get up to vomit because the basket of apples reminds you of your son. A cradle of red. Your lovely baby boy. 

When you’re in bed again, you feel his hand stroking your head, heavy and slow in its repetitiveness, as if this is what he must do- for himself or for you, you don’t know. Every touch and sound spoken or made only registers as a muffled impression of itself to you. When your mother brushes her hands through your hair, it's as if she was gently searching through the roots for you. They all had the same look, one that seemed as if you were lost.

But you hadn’t gone away, only within yourself. While nested in bed for most of the days, you dreamed of the same childhood forests, and standing in the middle of a clearing. When you weren't dreaming, you were quietly weeping. Not always from the stitches, or your swollen breasts- particularly painful from the milk is the sore reminder it produces. You were crying for someone that could not for it. 

You were only doing your body as you were sensed and meant to.

After awhile, you notice the apples on the bedside have started to develop soft spots, hinting to an overripeness. When everyone is asleep at night, you bury the apples with your hands outside in the planter pots, then the rest of the fruit in the kitchen and because it made sense to, you bury spare change, the keys to the house and car- including the spares, your engagement ring, and a picture frame with a photo of you and your son's father.

The next morning you're found curled among your handiwork, your night dress dirt sheened, and your hands mired with soil and blood from the plants you uprooted. Limp green corpse-stalks scattered around you like the tatters of a ground nest. 

At the persuasion of your mother, you get into the half filled bathtub she prepared, with all your clothes on. You were sobbing, cradling the empty weight of your gutted belly, and when she enters the tub to embrace you, you don’t weep. You wail out loud: a sound that prolonged throughout the house, the loudest sound you have ever made emanating from your earliest memory, the reverberations of your voice echoing your son that did not get to cry. 

You were your Mother’s child. 

[unrebirth]

encore

At your father’s funeral you thought about how strangely compact his coffin looked. Contemplating the boxed narrow of a human being. For some reason, you had imagined the coffin to be a little longer. A prolonged life coda composed into a stubby passage. When he’s being lowered into the ground, the coffin seems weightless - a flat note send off from living - arbitrary, more like an unnecessary fermata in the composition. Dead soil in between dead wood in between dead tafetta in between a dead man…  What’s the difference.

The instrument of your father’s crescendo was a shotgun. Birdshot shell sforzando conducted from the sofa stage to a non-audience in the living room. Triggered muzzle flicker-flash applause. Splatters of cranium, brain and blood staccato on the ceiling, the walls and through them too. Your father told you he once wanted to be a musician.

Your father once told you many things he wanted to be and do. Be a traveler. To buy a new car. Be a sommelier. To buy land somewhere. Be a pious ascetic. To buy the other shop next door. Be at the mercy of something bigger. Buy a throne of things, never mind the leakages in the kitchenette. He’ll fix it, he’ll fix it, he knows, he declares, he likes declaring. Be the king of a lurid yellow throne upstairs, humoring the indifferent fish-subjects on the downstairs royal court of a brickbox palace aquarium shop.

The shop is named ‘palace’, and the name seems like a joke at the expense of his own cruel obliviousness. Your father likes inside jokes. 

Your father was always vague with his dreams. He has to be, in order to be the king of everything, hard enough to declare a leakage let alone jurisdictions. King of a throne but never sitting on it, it’s not easy being a sovereign of the everything land bordered only by what you know. You can’t be exact in dreaming, otherwise you’ll have to wake up. It’s not that his own dreams are vague- we don’t dream what we already know. 

You’ve never known where he wanted to travel and the landmarks he mentions might as well be on nowhere postcards that all illustrate the same nameless beaches with the same strict sea horizon delineating some man’s idea of the world, and the land he wants to buy is always a streak of vague greenery, with a daubed house on a field patch that’s somehow secluded but artificial in the boxy architecture of his imagination.

When he told you he once wanted to be a musician, he was never exact about the genre or the instrument though he did used to play an acoustic guitar. But he could never finish playing a single nameless tune and anyway, he always sang in a strange off key. Not tone deaf, just making sounds of his own. Half a pitch deep then sloping up then down, middling in volume, in between demonstrating to a no one audience and to only hear himself. He once told you what a polyphony is.

Your mother laments your dreaming father with a dissonant reverence at the same time. She once told you about the posters he had as a boy - which you can’t imagine him once being but after the funeral maybe you could - how your father’s father had torn them up, and how the old guitar he… Then there’d be that sharp note anger as she spoke that’d slope to a flat again, the downstairs tumbling syllables of grief. Your father lived inexactly and that’s his immortality, and in a way the awry pitch of your mother’s voice is also your father’s cord. 

When you try to imagine him as a boy, you think of the funeral and the coffin keeps getting smaller. It’s the burial plot that keeps widening. The last thing he said to you was goodnight. There is nothing more innocent than a dreaming boy, and a dead child is immortal.

He liked declaring.

Your father told you he once wanted to be a musician. You are 16 and cleaning what was once revealed to you of your father, the corporeal facts of your father, not just a father vessel, king specter with a shadow that will outlive him. In exact blood, flesh, and bone. Still he lives on, prolonged this way, in vague mortal pieces that a forensics lab will sternly declare, in neat, uppercased font on a strict lined report that will say it was a human being. But that’s just a matter of fact and not the reality of a dream.

Your father would argue this: a year after, you found a piece of his skull behind the sofa. Your father once told you he wanted to be a musician. You pick up the skull pick piece. 

Encore, encore! You feel like you’re seated among the no-audience he’d performed for, in off key hysterics, doubled over in between laugh-crying, curved on the floor like a question mark - the exact emotion of the imaginary spectators he’d conducted from a personal stage.

Encore!

[unrebirth]

paranoiaspoisondoor​:

everything is twisting, clenching, buckling under the weight of itself– under the weight of too many years wasted and too many thoughts gone unsaid. the pain of his shoulder is nothing compared to the nagging need to speak, to tell, to somehow take back the silence that has shoved itself between them and pried against their flesh until it reached the bone, and against bone until it splintered into uselessness.

there is a plea welling up in him, begging her to leave him be, because it must be what he deserves. his ribs have not closed, instead fusing together into a tangle of joints and sharp edges, protecting a heart that insists on eating itself. he knows she is not the same, and more: he knows that she cannot heal him, because to heal him is to break herself apart and stitch him together with sinew.

the plea is pushed down by her voice. he can nearly see her breath in the cold air.

a nurse told him that hospitals keep themselves so cold to avoid the spread of disease.

“You’re too nice to me.” the smile finally breaks through and he finally meets her eyes– and she looks beautiful. the dull buzzing in the back of his skull works quickly to block out the flashing images of leftovers for one, of calendars forever half-crossed out, of an old dog bowl, long forgotten after its replacement. he does not allow himself to remember the emptiness. “I’ll be okay.”

her words envelop him in a warmth that he can feel travel up his neck and down to his fingertips, which twitch in at the thought of reaching out. his smile fades as he speaks.

“Are you okay? Have you been okay?”

-

His smile beckons hers from the threshold of uncertainty, away from the lukewarm hallway of hesitant familiarity and drawn in by the blue invitation of his eyes. A welcoming warmed by memory, persuading the soft broadening of her smile, cradling her cheeks with a faint flush her skin has not forgotten.

Shyly eyes flicker to her idle hands then kindly meets his again when she looks up, “I’m never too nice for anyone,” her voice quiets slightly, like a secret sound only she wanted him to hear, “Not even you.”

What was it like looking at him? Like this, like once. Somewhere else beyond the paling light of this room, in a place that exists in her heart, where the memory climate is always warm, the overhanging pit stop refuge of a tree is an exact green, and the sidewalk pavements cracked from everyday living is a promise. Her halfway walking home alone, emerging to him quietly- a certain boy then: shoulders characteristically tempered by a certain waiting apprehension to any approach. She'd waited in turn instead, for that curious glance she'd come to know- an acknowledging permission of some kind. Mindfully nearing and smiling, cheeks fuller from the warm flush of that day. She remembers saying his name with an openness to possibility  ('Eli?'), and enunciating it with the fullness of promise for the first time ('Hello, Eli!').

“I know you will be, Eli.” her smile reclines, into a half sagged, fondly weary one that says 'of course, this is another way of how I’ve always known you’. That easy reassurance… the many ways he has said it before, not always a promise but an asking to be believed in because she knew he needed her to. Loose curls tumbles from the gently resigning slope of her shoulders as she leans slightly. She remembers, and can say his name.

When his smile fades, she wants to remember him again in another way. To cradle his face in her hands, a careful row of fingers under his jaw- like prospecting for bruises on a fruit- or an apple shaped heart, to trace the years that have drawn troughs around the eyes that water it, and place tendering thumbs in the shallows under the cliffside of his cheeks where they meet again. To be able to say ‘hello’ differently this time, at the peak of time’s valley. 

But there is no peak, just the sterile flat ground of the present. Caroline’s hands are on the pleated valley of her pale green skirt, clasped around each other, fidgeting in their idle. She can see his hands, and she can only glance at them; her hands are in the slight middle shallow of her lap because there is nowhere else to put them. Doesn’t know where to put them. Or how to answer him.

The ground of the present, in this season of drought, is too flat and seedless, insisting in ways that she could only yield to. A fruit will always insist on the ground. In between the gaps of words, the smell of the tangerines faintly persist, and her smile witheringly remains, plump lips twig curved like they want to bear something else.

It’s the bud of guilt, “I think.” she can’t quite smile now, but still, the present insists in the smell of antiseptics, in this cold room, “I don’t know.'' The green tinged glint of memory is in her glassy eyes, and the time she can go back to is only to the earlier hours. This is not a place in her heart. “When I heard about you- before you called me, I thought….” her voice is a half-whisper, as if the whole sound of her words would speak it into existence, “I thought I’d never see you again. So I...” tears silently ripen to ample droplets on her cheeks, “I’m sorry.”

She wants to say hello again differently. When fruit falls to the ground, even when it yields to the ferment, it continues prospecting underground, existing in extant.

“I’ve missed you.”

[unrebirth]

HEADCANON

The aquarium shop, aesthetics, atmosphere and layout

THE SHOP 01. The LED sign board that displays the shop’s name used to be a bright, royal blue and is tinged greenish-yellow by the years. ‘Palace’ is written in a yellow, cursive font, but  is presently sallowed to a shy luridness, as if withdrawn from its name. Written beneath it is ‘AQUARIUM SHOP’ in black, times new roman font, smaller, but insistent. Like a fine print to its name.

02. The building of the shop is two stories tall and modestly sized, its exterior are weather-weary brick walls. Its obvious age, the gaudy sign and the walls paints the shop with a sense of ugly quaintness. Squeezed in between a row of shops on a street that has not quite resigned to its inevitable abandonment following the somewhat recent construction of a strip mall nearby. It has somehow managed to survive alongside a butcher’s, a cramped laundromat, a convenience store, and a two store wide generationally owned grocery shop that has seen other tenants come and go over the years.

03. On the display window are old taped on promotional posters for long expired discount deals, bleached by the sun, some barely hanging on. Advertisements for a brand of fish pellets on sale. On a good day, maybe Sarah will let you get away with getting a discount from 1999. 

04. The security camera by the door no longer functions and will not be fixed for a longer time than its been broken. When the door is opened, sometimes a vaguely baroque sounding melody will play for a couple of seconds, warbled pathetically by the doorbell ringer. Most of the time it’s shut off when Sarah is downstairs at the counter.

05. On the counter is a full box of the shop’s promotional magnets, half effortly presented alongside a keychain display holder with tacky keychains of fish shaped charms and the shop’s logo. A small bowl filled with fish pellets is there too, for the occasional children that visit to feed the fish. 

06. Everything to be expected to be found in an aquarium shop can be found here- equipment, tanks, food, gaudy decorations etc. The catalogue of fish on display is relatively impressive, considering its unexpected of the shop to have anything more than gold or betta fish. In the middle of the shop’s floor however, is a single, large tank where a plecostomus resides in. It has been on display for awhile, and it seems it might always be on display rather than for sale. 

07. There is a a storage room, haphazardly organized with stock and unsold boxes of store advertisement merchandise that her father had overestimated. Mixed in are some boxes of junk and broken appliances that have been forgotten about. The room has a door that leads to the back alley where a motorbike is covered with tarp underneath, shielding under a makeshift shelter. 

08. Inside, the shop seems to be perpetually dim, everything paled with a hint of blue as if time there was permanently on the cusp of midnight. The low murmuring bubbles of water filters, and whispering humming of the lights shallowly breathing life into the shop’s space. It undertones the music she puts on through the shop’s speakers. As the day outside settles, silvery ribbons of the water from the array of fish tanks within reflects on things. When you’re here, you feel as if you’ve been here awhile and you aren’t meant to, the shop feels like a threshold to somewhere else. 

UPSTAIRS / LIVING AREA

01. Behind the frosted glass door besides the counter is an upstairs passageway that leads to the shop’s second floor which has been converted into a modest apartment. It has a kitchenette combined with a living room, and grailed sliding doors that leads to a balcony where a clothes drying rack stands. The overall area is relatively tidy, although not necessarily neat, things seems to be arranged according to its own sense of vague organization. Slight spots of messes like a book turned over its face on the coffee table and an empty glass beside it, the guarantee of return. It is pleasantly lived in, and seems brighter than downstairs. 

02. The single sofa in the living area can be pulled out into a bed, and a neatly folded throw blanket rests against the headrest. Beside it is a short bookcase that has steadily been running out of space, and on top of it is a record player. A small box of records sits at the foot of the bookcase. On the wall behind the sofa are pockmarks from a shotgun bullet ricochet. 

03. In the small bathroom, there is a cramped shower combined with a bathtub. It’s plain, and not untidy. 

04. There is a single bedroom It’s simple, not quite decorated, and almost seems cut off compared to the living / kitchenette area. No personal remnants- like a photo frame or a half gutted makeup bag on the dressing table, if they exist then they’re all stored away somewhere unknown. This room could seemingly be anyone’s room. Tidy, nothing out of place, except for a large suitcase jutting beneath the bed, as if someone was readying to leave. On the wall shared with the sofa, are pockmarks from the bullet shrapnels that had managed to burst through it. 

[unrebirth]

@paranoiaspoisondoor / @palacecurse / @voisemadeofteeth

His hand hovers near the back of his head, “It was just- just kinda hangin’ off her face,” fingers curl around the memory of flapping scalp skin, as if he could find a loose thread of skin to peel in demonstration- cling callous fingers underside the impression of subcutaneous fat and reveal the bone white vividness of the image. 

“Like you know- some kinda... wet plastic bag, half her face    just hangin’ over the other...half peeled, think it was...was an accident or somethin’.”

[unrebirth]

DISSOCIATION : MUTT’S PERPETUAL PLAYLIST

SO TIRED - slowdive / NUMB - iris / MARIGOLD - nirvana / THE SLEEPWALKER - cat power / EXIT MUSIC (FOR A FILM) - radiohead / WORDS - low / MEDS - placebo / ONLY SHALLOW - my bloody valentine / BREAK MY BODY - pixies / NO CONTROL - brand new / SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK ALIEN - radiohead 

[unrebirth]

It’s 4 AM.

OUTSIDE: the stagnant black tides of night time recedes. The flushed red of newborn dawn laps the nightscape shores, perfusing the horizon, reviving the grey cityscape.

INSIDE: a square seclusion where a separate plane of reality exists. Through the indifferent lens of an incorporeal observer we see the stationary setting of a shoeboxed office. There’s an empty desk to the left of this room, pushed against the formica wall that divides this small room into another smaller room. A plastic name plate that says ‘RECEPTIONIST’ on the same table, half faced away as if whoever had placed it had been hesitant to put it there. No one has ever occupied the seat behind the desk to claim and straighten it. Everything that occupies this borrowed space is stilled and seemingly where it should all be. Even the mug carelessly abandoned on the edge of the desk- holding its breath to not teeter over.

The cold lens of the same spectator we view this isolated panorama through slowly pans to the right, following the dim spillage of light from the single lamp on the low side table beside a worn down leather sofa. It is occupied. The observer stills for a moment - as if caught off guard, holding a breath in unembodied lungs - ascertaining the occupant, whose corporeal shape is made vague by the thin blanket it’s draped under. It’s the form of a sleeping man, the soft rise and fall of his chest steadily rigid, in tune to the circadian rhythm of this office’s square reality.

At first glance it seems as if this man should not be here. This man should be home. Our phantom spectator nears, hovering above his face. Shadows swarm parts the light cannot reach, cradling the underside of his jaw, raising the gaunt cliffs of his cheekbones, tracing the deep ridges of his under eyes. Despite being asleep, he still looks tired. Perhaps he has always looked that way. His body in its shrouded bone-weariness settled on the sofa, its worn leather just as exhausted as he seems to be. It’s through this observation that we suppose we are wrong about him not belonging in this scene.

The impassive observer draws back to glance around the room in a gradual, broad sweep. Noticing things it hadn't before, like the shuffled stack of manila folders on the coffee table in front of the sofa, the opened notebook beside it, the deep indentations from frustrated underlinings of illegible words on the pages, the culprit of it a blue pen missing its cap, lying idly on a question mark. There is no answer to it, so the unknown question on the page lingers, and so does the eyes of the spectator. Under the jaundiced half light of the lamp, the blue writings almost look red.

There's a pervasive sense of unending fatigue in this place. A sense of eternity.

The same impassive gaze shifts to the sleeping man again. This man should be home, but homes are places defined by what we know, and the shared constant in every home is familiarity. Here, familiarity is the miasmic fatigue shared by everything in this place, and suddenly the man’s presence isn’t so strange. He's made a home out of it, carved into it, an existence made constant here because of it. Familiar and unfamiliar all at once, like a ghost who hadn’t realized his death, existing in the in-between- lingering where he lived and died.

Our onlooker whose eyes we peer through draws back slightly from the view of his face, and suddenly we feel and become distinctly aware of our intrusiveness. The man is still asleep, and for a moment he takes a sharp breath, eyes moving under still closed heavy lids. The spectator nears again, much closer this time, and we are able to clearly see every slight movement underneath. Deep sockets, the silhouette of the skull persistent underneath skin. The round outline of his eyes protruding slightly beneath his eyelids. The periorbital veins.

With every flickering movement we are drawn closer and closer, as the frame focuses towards this single eye. Every wrinkle and crease of the thin skin becomes vivid. Everything else that surrounds it disappears, and in the background, we hear his faint breaths reminding us that he is alive. Suddenly, the movement stops.

We still, waiting for the awakening flicker of an open eye but it never happens. His eyes remain closed. The man is still asleep- dreaming, maybe. Maybe in that dream, he awakes.

In the dream he wakes into, it’s 4 AM.

The sky is an endless black tarp and the moon is missing. Beneath it is somewhere on unknown outskirts, where the darkness of the night is denser and the malnourished wilderness suppressed by concrete cracks through the crevices, flourishing with a starving hallelujah in choruses of lanky reeds, thin-ribbed coyotes and dapples of dying moss. Far ahead the horizon, the gum-red sunrise margins the uneven grey teeth-silhouette mass of the city. Like breaths through a wet mouth, exhalations of hot oil and wet garbage spreads across the dead tongue plains here. It’s not much quieter here than the city either. The ceaseless low murmur of a knee-deep river interrupted by pairs of heavy legs wading through. Uncertain chatter echoing from one another. Pale silver beams of light cutting across the surface. Officers in fluorescent jackets - the yellow-green glare strobing off stray flashlight flares - clogging the vein of the waters in aimless certainty of what they’re searching for. David stands on the riverbank, dry and bleary eyed, the strobes of red and blue lights entering the peripheries of his sights hazy and pin-pointed in his vision. Even with the surrounding lights, the water is opaque and unforgiving. Still, he stares at it, as if he could cut through it with the knife of his glare.

Someone stands next to him and asks, “Think we’ll find it here?”. The question registers through a delayed echo (‘-here?’). It takes a moment for him to answer, decipher what ‘it’ meant, and then he remembers, “Yeah. We should.” He remembers the scene, one frame after another, the flick, flick, flick succession of photographic memory echoing amidst the sound of splashing water as if he could see the images rippling to the surface.

He remembers the body they’d recovered earlier that evening. Some jogger had found the body, and the same succession of the same old phrases followed when some uniform questioned him, ‘I didn’t think it was real, I thought it was a mannequin-’. Then he pictures the body somewhere along the stretch of the river's throat, nested on a bed of grass, dirt and reeds, legs lapped by the water, and spat out. The hard contrast between life and lifelessness in between the layers of pallid skin, the crushed green beneath the weight and the dirt that grew the bedding of tall grass that would have buried the body instead. 

He remembers the thick jagged line at the neck. The saw-teethed stump of bone and muscle, exposed flesh darkened and drained of the red fluid pulse of life. The uneven skin around it jagged and raw.

The reminder that someone had lived remains, but had been made anonymous in death. As he thinks of the futile greyness of the skin, he remembers the man he’d spoken to earlier. The carefully slow deliberation in his tone as he spoke of her and recalled, as if piecing her together, ‘I used t’see her, used t’see her here every week, an' she'd come in an' talk to me...’. Framing an uncanny picture of her in his mind, the gleam of her resurrected eyes dulled. 'I used t'see her,' he kept repeating, grasping. 

Then David remembers every soul kept alive in his memories, alive with what he knows of them. Infinite someones who were fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, sisters and brothers. Suspended in time, their ghosts that would not decay drifting in the river of his mind, lukewarm and floating through a liminal grey landscape where it's neither night or day.

Maybe that’s what eternity looks like, what limbo is. That in-between circular antechamber of being alive and not. 

He remembers the blurry outline imprinted on the grass after the body had been moved, vaguely human and bright. In his memory, the scene is vivid, in his memory, there is a picture of a life. A life whose years have been compressed into an epitaph of ‘it’ and ‘a mannequin’. 

“We’ll find her.” he says, half turning to finally face Perrino. A detective sergeant and a stocky man, known for the inscrutable and characteristic grimace of his face with the disposition of a bulldog- an expression that seemed particularly distinct in the moment, as if he’d smelled something bad. Right side of his mouth hiked up. Then again, he’d always looked that way around David. Hard not to sense haunted men like him in a job that familiarizes you with the smell of decomposition. The ghosts of decay tend to linger. 

Perrino says nothing, and David moves towards the river, steel stick and flash light in hand, the wet floor of the riverbank sucking against the soles of his boots. He carefully slips in, and the wet coldness sinks in, reminding his body of its own warmth humming all throughout his skin. His own aliveness.

Legs wade through, and so do the undigested litter picked loose from tangled dead roots. Slowly he finds himself further away from the others - uniforms and other long-suffering detectives - their voices muffled by the growing distance, the unrelenting rush of water and the murmuring chants of crickets lurking in the reeds and grass like dried frayed skin bordering the river. The sound of his breath audible, his body warming up again, thrumming alive, alive, alive. The thickening darkness amplifying the isolated brightness of his flashlight.

Then, he finds her.

Long, dark hair webbed among the pondweeds. Awkwardly turned away, the thick strands of hair covering most of her face as if shielding herself from the intrusive beam. The crickets are quieter now, only the sound of his heartbeat echoes in his ears.

Carefully, he turns her head over, propping the side against the stick - facing up at him. Dark brown eyes peer under half-lids, frozen with a vague, pale expression, as if she’d realized something that had been obvious, something that only the dead can fully comprehend and the living can only decipher through what remains. An expression David has seen countless times before, on different faces, because death has many.

The muscles in his jaw move and he can feel it taut under his skin, mouth opening, but no sound comes out. If it had, then no one hears him, and he can hear no one else but his own aliveness in his ears, the pulsing echo in the contracting of his warm and slick throat.

In the apathetic horizon, the day keeps emerging, but it’s still dark, and beneath the ember of the crimson sunrise, the black water turns red.

He found himself frozen too, staring into her gaze. Beneath the glare of light, the deepness of her eyes becomes translucent, as if lucid. Something in the water revives. A coursing river and the free flowing pour of blood is not so different in how life channels through. Maybe that was what made her unbodied head seem alive, her hair flowing in the water with a strange liveliness as if substituting missing limbs.

The surrounding dark lending of its bright darkness to her; transforming her head into a round, pale moon…

She blinks.

It is still 4 am when David awakes.

Eyes flutter open, and the pale, circular shadow of the lampshade reflects on the ceiling. In the spell of sensory haze, he can almost see the same face peering at him. His body violently jerks upright, as if strung upwards by invisible sinewy strings. “Fuck,” hands flutter to his eyes, digging the heel of his palms against them until multicolored dots float in his vision.

When he looks up again, the face is no longer there but it remains in the wetlands of his mind, floating upright in the stream, in the endless flow of lukewarm monotony of everything unalive that he keeps. Intermingled in the algae and moss. 

We are still spectating him. There is no ghost here, only a haunted man.

[unrebirth]

HEADCANON

Voice, speech mannerisms

01.  Due to a severe throat injury - a self inflicted result from a particularly violent manic episode involving a knife - a cut laryngeal nerve and a temporarily paralyzed vocal cord has tuned his voice to become husky and quiet. Dry rasps hinting in its vocalization- perhaps intimidating (something he’s vaguely aware of) upon first speaking, but it’s quickly gentled with Mutt’s passively candid disposition that can either be percieved as either alarming or endearing. Though over the years his voice has gradually improved in volume and clarity, his voice is presently a vague reminiscence of what it used to sound like. 

02.  There’s a notable tone in his voice, that of a questioning echo at the end of most of his sentences as if he questions himself as he speaks. A hint of uncertainty, perhaps. Mutt is not necessarily unconfident, rather he grasps his words as he says them because he has difficulty verbally expressing himself. It’s half because of an inherent reticence and mostly an attempt at overcoming how TBIs have affected his ability to socialise. This has formed into a speech patterned with repetition at times, with Mutt having a tendency to repeat words / himself. 

03.  Mutt has a long island accent. It's the most particularly notable trait when he talks, though not something that's of note to him even though it may be stark to some. When / if pointed out, he will say he has 'always talked like this'.

[unrebirth]

palacecurse​:

the kitchen was a familiar setting for cash, besides working side by side with vito and red respectively. he got to converse with the lady who ran it, often leaving the kitchen with a container of food and faint marks on his arm from being swatted by a wooden spoon for playing a little too much.

he had the day off and was in search of something to do, and it just so happened he was passing said restaurant and decided to poke his head in. a smile crept on his face when he saw his friend in the kitchen and he quickly turned to greet the small woman that was directing the others in the kitchen. 

“Как дела, любимая?” he said, leaning over and giving her a hug before walking over to the sink to wash his hands. “knew i’d see you in here, what’s on the menu old man?” cash teased, drying his hands with nearby paper towels before discarding them in a nearby bin.

-

It’s a strange synthesization of a backwoods baritone and crude fluency of his mother tongue’s language, any articulation of a learning crawl made up with a self-assured pronunciation. Like a tightly tuned chord of some kind being plucked, the strung twang reverberating along the string of familiarity’s rich instrument, emphasizing the foreign sphere the bubble of this kitchen- the restaurant itself floated in. No one seemed to notice and continued on uninterrupted, or if they had, then they hadn’t minded, and if someone had, then babushka had endeared herself to it a long time ago with amusement. Vitomir minds it in passiveness. 

Cash’s interposing presence stood between home and not home. The laps of homesickness has long since dried up, and in its place is a well of familiarity with a worn rope fastened to the pail he’s always reaching into it with- not to dredge up grief, but to remember with. Places you’re from you only know as much as you remember them, after all. “Soon enough I won’t be able to tell you apart from natives.” he says, not looking up yet, stripping the rest of the potato in his hand before dropping it into the bucket next to his stool, dully clattering it against the rest.

He starts on another, the sharp strip of the knife yanking thin the potato’s skin mirroring the canine glimpse of his now half-upturned mouth, “Old man, huh? After all this time you know me.” a long, curled spud strip hangs over the basin from the turn of his knife, “These are for the vareniki and piroshki. Double the usual before we open. They’ve been going quick- must be the weather.”

[unrebirth]

voisemadeofteeth​:

Through glass stained blue eyes, New York had started off as Broadway and bright lights. It was dirty subway handles, and the Bronx and cigarette burns on stolen mattresses. New York was never intended to be home, more like a rest stop, but years later and a list of her favorite haunts growing, Micah had come to the conclusion New York was not going to let her go.

Drowning out the smell of car exhaust and sweat and urine that seemed to coat this city, the tiny restaurant had become a safe haven. No one in their right mind would down borstch unprompted, and the watchful eye of the older woman that seemed to own the place brought an extra level of protection. Safety. 

the bell dings are Micah walks through the door, padding her feet on the already soaked mat to try and keep the snow and grime off the floors. 

The clattering in the kitchen drowns out her ‘hello’ so she lets herself in, coming to halt at a familiar face. A stammer of an explanation halts in her throat before she just shakes her head, cheeks flushed from the cold lift as the corners of her lips slide upwards. “Oh, no, I placed a big order for Syrniki and the homemade peach jelly… Uhm…” She’s going to butcher the next word, but she says it anyway. “The… Varenye.” She explains voice lowering as the mangled word falls from her lips, tilting her head as she watches him work. 

“I didn’t know you worked here.”

-

The intervening unfamiliarity sifts through recognition, and persuades an upward half-tilt of his chin, eyes peering up at the transient pilgrim of babushka’s temple-kitchen. A half-smile is kneaded from the straight-cut marble strict ascetic line of his mouth that had then been committed to quiet meditative concentration, beckoned by her gingerly earnestness. For a moment the soft rise of memory flickers in the blink of his eyes on her like cloud-steams floating up to the kitchen’s ceilinged sky: he wonders if his own daughter would be or was ever as keen and lamb-legged. Every child stumbles after all. In the near distance, the timbre of a leg bone being cut echoes from a cutting-board altar, cleaving away meat and his memory.

His mouth benevolently yields to a smile without complementary correction, “No, that does sound very important.” he finishes peeling the potato - the last of the pile - in his hand and drops it into the bucket next to his stool. “You’re improving.” he says, passive conviction in his tone, as if it’d been a simple truth. And it was, most things in this world were, it’s conviction that complicates, and because of it there were few things that are ever certain, then his offered sincerity is one of them. The knife freely pillows itself in the basin from his hand, and he reaches for the ragged towel on his shoulder, wiping his hands of labored sheen he has begun to feel dully pulse in his forearms, “Work? No, this is a duty.”

A beat passes, silenced in the muffle of cloth buffing against skin, his smile rescinding to focus on his hands,  “If every duty in this world is work, then we would not be living well, if we’re to live at all.” Satisfied, the cloth is relieved of its duty to rest on his shoulder, a slack roll of his head coaxing the grind-pop in his neck before he moves to stand up, bucket in hand. “Syrniki, peach jelly and varenye, was it? I’ll check.”

“We won’t be opening until a little later, you can wait in front. Warm yourself up.” a pause, “Borscht?”

[kuutamosonaatti]

MADS MIKKELSEN FOR FLAUNT MAGAZINE

[unrebirth]

paranoiaspoisondoor​:

an officer caught off guard, unprepared– somehow failing to heed the first rule of that they’ve heard since day one: don’t get yourself hurt. he can picture the station now: full of feigned sympathy or, even worse, genuine pity for a man “injured in the line of duty”. when he can pull himself out of the hospital bed and into his office, he’ll be met with a stack of cards and lips that say we’re so sorry, with dissonant expressions of disappointment. at least he’ll get a free cake out of it.

the pit of his stomach is vast and empty, void spreading as far as it can with sludgy fingers that seem to infect flesh with a sense of dysphoria. after so many hours of it, eli has come to the conclusion that waiting may be the worst thing man has to suffer. every moment confined to a hospital bed is a well-blended mixture of torture– constant insistence that hope will soon come, but he knows that those promises are empty.

he wouldn’t blame her for not coming. in fact, he’s written a list of justifications for her absence. all she has to do is check a box and eli will never speak to her again. maybe she’ll choose i still don’t forgive you or i’m too busy to be visiting a pathetic piece of shit. he wouldn’t blame her. he wouldn’t blame her for showing up just to spit in his face.

the void has begun to wrap around his lungs, compressing them under pounds and pounds of nothingness. looking at the door when he hears the handle turn is a marathon until he registers who stands just beyond the threshold.

“—Hey.” there’s a pull at the corners of his mouth– lips begging to smile, though he suppresses any sign of excitement. blinking does nothing to lessen the watery tinge of redness in his eyes. “I’m just glad you came.”

Her smile feels misplaced even in its intended assurance, muscles aware of memory but not remembering. The facial stutter before you recognize someone from a distance, before you call and enunciate their name.

“Of course. I…” a breathed pause temporarily gaps, “I came because I want to be here.” -for you, his name remains behind her teeth, as if it’d be drawn against them with the uncertain syllables of mispronunciation if she wasn’t careful. She hadn’t called him because of that uncertain distance.

Can you still call a name if it’s distance that estranges them from you? Isn’t ‘you’ also a synonym of a name? He’d called Caroline, half hope intoned, if she can’t say his name yet then she can admit to hearing him.  An honesty articulated in her bearing, gently insisting in her voice, answering to be heard by him in this isolated space.

She'd been standing long enough to linger. Moving with an awoken realization- sudden but unhurried, she pulls a bedside chair closer and sits. Her eyes substitutes the lingering onto him, interrupted with a slight parted mouth, cuing the pulled thermos out of her shoulder bag. Hands idle themselves against the steel as if expecting to feel the souped warmth, "I just thought to bring you something, um… a little last minute but I'd thought that you..." she trails off, and her wandering eyes settle on his. Starkly vivid, even beneath the fluorescent dim. Bright with the gleam of the present. Bright in the way she'd seen the probable glimpse of its absence when the news reached her.

She pulls out a pair of packeted tangerines, and places it alongside the thermos on the bedside table, "Sorry, maybe this is a bit much."  She breathes, the smell of antiseptics sharp against her nose. The glimpse of a bandage peeking against his shoulder stinging against her eyes.

 A slight tremor is beginning to ripple the surface of her- in her smile, in her hands as they fidget in her lap, and in her voice as it softens to pacify a jagged wave. "How are- how are you feeling?"