Excerpt II

excerpt 4/27/24

Have I told you that you are the warmest womb to ever have revived me?

The doctors won’t listen.

I visit her daily until I can’t anymore. She understands, tells me I’m the only one who makes her feel guarded, and I have never thought of guarded in the sense of secure, only closed. My dear friend lies still in her cotton consummation, destined to blight the waters with blood, and I fear I am the only one who knows how to help– Would you really stoop to such a rotten sense of delusion? On what pedestal must you stand to enlighten a child–

How can I make this a metaphor? Something big and brutal, like Fritz Watruba’s Dubbed Wotrubakirche, but imagine the reflections of interior light shine through an eyelet and the soles of your shoes are made of synchronically lighting matches, one with each step. Now imagine your conscience is confined to a lock and key, and the only way to obtain that key is to eat a small meal each day, and everyone around you tells you not to eat it, don’t you want to be normal, do you not miss the little crumbs in your bed, the men in your hair, I ate the food and it made everything better, they still won’t let me visit my family, they still tell me I’ve one more round, they say they will unlock my chest but I’m starting to think the reflective glass is just some sort of dreamscape, and don’t forget your lumbrical muscles are almost completely gone by now– You can take a moment to collect your thoughts. Find the coal beneath those boots. Think of the most serene landscape and imagine it overflowing with bees. I don’t know what else you want from me. I don’t know how else to tell you that I am everything that will never be known.

The man on my shoulder tells me I’m the epitome of woe, always tripping over my feet to conquer these fictitious figures, and when I tell him he’s about as much of a fact as a woman is to be born with a uterus, he squints his eyes and argues the constructs of gender are God-made, that we are born to birth, birthed to born, and it cannot be said simpler.

*****

— ODH