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There’s blood on the walls and it's getting worse every day. I’m starting to wonder if it's not just the moths and the mice that are dying as a result of my carefully placed traps. I’m starting to wonder if something larger has been injured and is watching from the shadows, or from the closet, or from underneath the bed. Waiting for me to leave, or for me to drop my guard, or for me to fall asleep on the couch. Every so often, the air's a little too stale, a little too dead to be innocuous, and there's a little more blood on the walls.
Maybe I’m dead and this is hell and I’m only just now starting to realize what's happened. Maybe you're not even real anymore.
Maybe I imagined you all along.
I’ve been trying to stop the moths and the mice for weeks now. They persist. I lie motionless on the floor for hours and listen to them in the walls as they do the things that mice and moths do. I’ve got holes in my sweaters and holes in the drywall behind the kitchen sink. I smell their shit in the carpet. Last week, the scars on my left arm once again became apparent. Yesterday, it was raining when I thought I saw you through the window, calling to me. Black water ran down your cheeks like tears. A trick of the light? After a moment, you were nothing... gone.
What are these perpetual context clues and why can't I decipher them?
I remember what it felt like to put my face against your naked belly and the smell of your skin. I remember counting all of the fine hairs just below your navel as you ran your fingers across my head, and you sang songs without words to me, and I mumbled forgettable things to our unborn child. How I put my hands over the pages of the book you were reading and you reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. I remember what the condensation looked like, the way it made a ring on the polished wood and how it ran down your wrist. Broken pieces of ceramic on concrete: the way the ice cubes sounded as you spit them back into the glass. How your fingers were cold when you placed them on my eyelids and told me to sleep.
Was life ever real? I would like to think that it was, that it is, that you are, but something bigger than that kind of life is lurking in the crevices of my home and it's almost audible: no, no no. The blood on the walls is real, when all I have left of you is the memory of experience that in it remains suspect. What have I captured? Or perhaps, more appropriately,
what is it that has captured me? |