Internally Observing

This was an experiment in writing without the usual recourses to visual effects or using language that I deemed too 'telling'. It was an attempt to relay only an experience, but my wont is always to write in third person so... huh. That said, the plan was to use as few pronounsd as possible - it's surprisingly hard to avoid them! Well, anyway, it's some words. See what you make of them!

I'm not going to offer the usual analysis, not because I don't think it interesting, but because I appear to be posting daily and I suspect too much of that is off-putting! Also, this was experimental and designed purely to keep me writing so I'm not as interested. That said, I am posting it here in case anyone reads any of these posts (I can't believe that, after eight years since officially abandoning this place, anyone actually checks here at all!) and is interested.

We shall see. Maybe if I update enough I shall get visitors to the garden again, and wouldn't that be nice?

Regret leeched into the tongue, arcing dull electric through nerve endings, combining with a roughness at the fingertips, rubbing over memory. Loneliness reeked, sweating from the walls, air foetid and full, gasping to breathe without relief and without mercy. Pity, yes, but unrelenting closeness as before a storm without the hope of it breaking. Drumming, distant on the edge of hearing, incessant and staccato as though without rhythm or meter. Colourblind, so that the world was dull and grey - and he was still waiting for that rainbow, after the rain. Rubbing her fingers down the clothing, sheen and slick with design, eyes closed to focus - the pads of skin yielding to infinitessimal changes in the texture or folds. Moth-balls or musty inner cupboards - the inside of a closet - lingered in the nostrils, a taste electric less dull flashed at the tip of the tongue, insides alive with the possibilities.

Air out, he hadn't known it was held, so a gulp of the thickness beyond to replenish, like drowning. She hadn't known she could tremble as much as this. Feet arching, calves protesting but happy, muscles tensing where there had been no evidence of them before. Eyes wide shut, tightly bound, seeing was believing but belief meant denying vision. Hairs rose and fell, primeval parts warned of danger and predators, adrenaline surged in her veins, demanding movement, demanding release, demanding attention. No, he denied her, fists clenched in effort, muscles straining. Lungs full, face reddening, a heat passing across his brow and now there was no feeling, no touch - the body suspended alone and away from the internal struggle. Mouth opened, air out, gasping again, but more urgent and without control. How close had he come? How close had she come?

Colour. Flash of light. Mirror blinding.

Dark again, control re-established, letting the senses do the talking. Soft and sensual on the shoulders, cool and calm and collected on the arms. Knees shiver, chest quivered, and a feeling in the rear, between cheeks, impossible to analyse: alien, new, different. Beset by cliche, how he hated it, without any other way to explain things. Enough reading had been done, enough experiences sought, that he knew what she ought to say, knew how she ought to feel. And she did. Luxuriation in the stretching, comfort in the tightness, yearning in the mind.

Duality or singleness? Binary or a spectrum? Bright light streaming through the darkness from a small aperature and then splitting on the corner of the glass over the silver: radiating a rainbow in all frequencies. Physics and allegory combined to crown the sudden dryness of the mouth, the quickening of a pulse, the knowledge of what had been done. Knowing that a path begun could not be turned from, a beast unleashed would not be cowed, a darkness let free would enshroud and spread. Toes flexed above the mulch, heavy with moisture and slick with the ice of summer storms that moved and roiled with insects and fragments of old autumnal leaves. Shuddering and ragged lungs rose and fell to reach a newer, hesitant rhythm. She was free.

It hung wrongly, the hem tickled the wrong parts of the knees at the front, was absent behind; a neckline drooped with nothing to drape over, the sleeves caught above the elbow, rucked and were too tight, arms forced to keep straight and down. A mirage wavered in the desert, heat rose from an unknown furnace to smother the vision before it could form, and now there was a new chorus. A different dawn, no birdsong, only laughter. No alarm, only the buzzing. No weather, only the burning burning burning. Almost without thought, his hands moved and unzipped, allowing the fabric to fall away, leaving only naked skin exposed to the cold in the harsh fluorescent glare though no one was watching. No one could feel the shame of the pooled clothing, no one could hear the breathing that caught in almost sobs but prevented by the iron power of will and hormones that prevented tears. No one knew the failure and always the drumming. No one could understand and see it all, no one could offer the comfort but refused and laughed instead. No one but he, before the mirror, in the room, in the night, with the dark outside and alone in his thoughts.

Then came the part that had never been written, the part that experiences always left out, alluded to but did not explain. Retrieval of clothing, donning the underwear: rougher and alien now, less soft and forgiving, but drawing up his legs and drawing him up too. Covering the naked vulnerability with the exoskeleton required to stand. Socks covered feet, so recently released from the prison of almost pleasure, and were joined in turn by the t-shirt. Softness of a different kind, borne of wear and utility and familiarity, frayed and old with holes in the armpits developing. Not in a scruffy way, none but he could tell, but a litany of events and memories, the signs of a life worn on the outside, wearing away as a river creates a canyon. Trousers, jeans, added and pulled to the waist, familiar and safe, dry and featureless, stretching into the distance where the haze met the shimmering horizon. Blue on blue: airstrikes from out of sight obliterating their targets with heavy bombing but the targets were his own side.

"You looked ridiculous," he told the empty mirror. Where a reflection should have been there was a darkness, a hole, an emptiness. Like dark matter, detected only by the warping effects on light; or the passage of an organism in the depths of the ocean, marked only by the subtle changes to eddies in the current or pressure of the liquid. Eyes open, staring, but nothing to be seen. Stubble, beard, harsh and scratching, bristles on a brush to scrub away the dirt on the tiled floor. Hair unkempt but not long, brown and featureless, an epitome of average. Oh yes officer, I can describe my assailant: they were average height, average weight and had brown hair and eyes, caucasian. Average. "You are ridiculous." And no one agreed.