Time, Always

A Queer Stream of Consiousness

The heat expanded every organ inside my body until it was unbearable. Until I didn’t recognize myself. My lungs would expand until I could feel my ribs shaking under the unbearable and glorious weight of every breath. My heart grew until I could feel it in my throat, threatening to expose my desires with every word I spoke. It was so human, I almost threw up.

Every time I thought about last July, my voice pitched. I could feel the ache in my heels from walking for hours in every thunderstorm. I thought it would heal me, to see the sun come through the clouds. I thought I could be baptized in the sort of storm that also threatens to kill you. I thought there was no salvation without the risk of making yourself a martyr.

I lived in an empty home for a year. My roommates were four ghosts who came and went at different hours of every day. There was one for the living room who sat across from me as I drank full bottles of wine by myself and said nothing. There was one for the kitchen, who watched my hands cut strawberries with a tuna knife as they told me they had to leave. One enjoyed the bathroom, materializing with the steam as I burned off a layer of skin in scalding water. The last lived in the bedroom, empty words waking me up in a sweat every hour of the night.

Thankfully, I only had four rooms. I’d hate to ask one of them to work overtime.

Yet, a new bedroom shocks the system more than we like to admit. Even when you thought you’d escaped, the bed begins to feel foreign. I thought about getting a new mattress, decided that was too expensive, and settled on new fancy bedsheets and a fresh Ikea comforter. This economy didn’t allow for one to abandon and replace the memories, so we would have to live with them for now.

Perhaps it was good. Perhaps I could sleep and learn to rest despite all that had happened. Perhaps I could cry and sob and scream and punch my pillows with the sheer curtains down to the people on the street could stop and watch my sad shadow puppet show. Perhaps I could relearn to feel in the place I forgot how.

When all was done, I would look at all their ghosts in the room with me. I would point to my new sheets and fresh bed and say, with burning eyes, “I was human after all. I was human the whole time.”

I think about tattooing all their names on my body. People would say, “But it's yours! It’s your body!” and I would tell them “No it's not. It’s always been theirs.” The minute the first one touched it. The minute I understood you could give a body away, I thought, “Maybe someone else would want it more than I did. Maybe someone else could get better use of it.”

I was a child under bedsheets. I was a child hiding from a God no one had even introduced me to. I was a child pulling parts of me to the side when I realized what it meant. I was seven. I was scared to death. I swore I would do whatever it took to be anything different. I avoided mirrors for three years. I avoided my thoughts for twenty more.

I had hated Summer. I resented the constant season. Summer had a tendency to kill anything green. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but my consciousness was closer to that of a delicate orchid. Too much chill, and I would curl up and perish. Too much heat, and I would spread out and burn. I was a child of the interims. I was the son of Spring and Autumn. I would be ash without them.

I couldn’t tell you when it was. Not the exact moment or walk. I think it took three months for me to even realize, but one day, I could not exist without the thick green humid air of Aestas. I suddenly feared Autumn. I feared the death of things, not for the first time, but because now I understood what it meant to live. In the viscous air, I had become something different than what I had always been. I was tainted and sinful and stale and wilted, and then suddenly, none of it mattered.

The garden regrows itself. I had left myself outside in the cold for as many seasons as i had lived. I had fed myself on the fear of the sun and the chill of the shade. I had dug roots so deep into dry soil, I thought I had collected everything I could. I thought about stealing water from generous trees, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Then one day, I watched two pale hands, small scars on the knuckles, wrap around me. With tears in my eyes, I felt my own warmth for the first time. For the first time, Summer had taken me in as hers. I was born in June. I was always meant to find my way home.