A series of semi-fictitious events

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Mother was always kind and whenever she could be, she was gentle. Yet there was always an open call for hemoglobin to attend openings at the scrapes left by her mouth or claws whenever she was around. It is not that she would bite or scratch, or that she enjoyed seeing skin blooming spectacles. No. She didn’t find any joy in others’ misery. It was more that she wouldn't notice-- her anatomy was sharp and a swivel of her head, or embracing reach of her arm could and sometimes would summon redness from the recipients of her love, unbeknownst to her. 

 

We had all began to associate the colour red with love because it was a frequent sight whenever we’d see her. Other children at kindergarten and school also assumed red to be the colour of love, so it all seemed right. Children never lie! It was life. It was love.  

 

Infact, everything was normal for us in childhood. We didn’t feel much different from anyone else, nor did we notice discrepancies in lifestyles or opportunities. Jealousy was a green color that flashed in other childrens’ eyes when they saw us, not the other way round. Our eyes were green, sure, but that is just how we were born. 

 

Now at the ripe old age of a ripe old age, I often get lonely. So I scratch myself or nibble a bit here and there, to bring about the colour of love in my life. It is slightly painful, but the feeling of love is bigger and better than the pain. So I deem it a small sacrifice for the greater good.

 

I went to the nail salon to get a set of acrylic nails a couple months ago. The colour I got was of a newborn baby lady-- delicate pink. The length was between one and two, and the talons extended my digits by at least the length of a ladybug. Typing on the computer became awkward, as the ladybug length became ladders and I had to bend my fingers at new angles for my words to climb onto the keyboard. No longer did the soft pads of my paws pitter patter on the keys. No-- now a hard clicking exhumed from my efforts, like a marching band, to type abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzäæöõøüå, which sound like the electricity in my neural-networks. 

 

Everything is like everything. When we say *i like that*, what we actually mean is *I want to be that*. I know this because I escape myself a lot by liking things. 

 

The moon was like a flower, blossoming light into the night. The moon does not enjoy the flower, it has no feelings. But yet we identify its attempts to want to be like the flower, through the modern day belief in the yet-to-be magic. When I said I like flowers, what I mean is I want to be like the flowers. I am like flowers. I like flowers. It is not a description of my feelings. Feelings are chemicals inside a body that we have titled feelings. Neither the moon nor I can be flowers, yet we like them, and we want to be like them, so we make ourselves more like them. 

 

My mother alluded to me that the moon is hormonal, meaning it also has feelings. It can be that someone is storing voluptuous sacs of hormones inside the silver orb, because the temperature in space is just right for storage of such chemicals. Then once a month (sometimes twice), they spray the hormones at us ladies and we bleed red with love for the moon. 

 

My face is like the moon, wide and beaming. And my heart is like the sun, it lights up my face. 

 

Back to my weapons of self-destruction. I stuck angels onto my baby-lady nails. They were elegant and beautiful, and I became a real virtue with them. Everyone adored my hands, not even knowing what they’re capable of. I can write beautiful worlds with them, but I can also strangle and kill. No one expects the latter because they simply sparkled with elegance oh my!

 

The plastic on my body was delicious, and I’d nibble on it and fill my belly with its micros. I did not manage to chew the whole things off, because I liked their vision more than taste, but it could have been helpful to become plastic in the times that ensued since their donning. 

 

My lover loved my hands too. He would hold them and tell them how their delight would release chemicals inside his brain. He wanted to be like them, but he could not because he was a tall man and it would have been too small a thing for him to be. He would have had to lose too many important parts of him to become them. When I took them off, he left me. In search of new beautiful things to become.

 

Our world is filled with beauty and it did not take him long to find another lady to want to eat. His absence did make a lot of painful redness flow from me. I became a river, and as soon as I did, I noticed I had been excavated by a terrible system. By the time I realized however, my river bed collapsed and killed a bunch of flora and fauna, and the people living on the banks all got flooded and cursed a man that they worshiped for their misfortunes. It was a natural disaster, and yet it was playing on the soap opera channel on TV. I was entertained when the episode climax climaxed with people cursing one particular man for destroying their lives and loves, but also protected the other men that ate all their food during the disaster. It seemed fried and unhealthy to me, so I turned off the TV and went for a walk instead.

 

My name starts with a T, which is quite far down the alphabet but not so far that I’d be the first if the alphabet was reversed. So I was always in the middle and rarely first, which let me know I am not that special or important. That was most likely good for my ego, because I am very special due to other aspects of my life. Now I am a bit more balanced as a person because my parents chose a caged letter. You also have to scroll for a while to find the Times New Roman font because it starts with a T.

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My my no eyes dry, talons dragged along the pavement. Shaped them sharper, the days grew darker, smarter I became. 

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It ends...

—8th May 2022

 

P.S. My own nails reclaimed their space. The plastic had destroyed them that lay so loyally underneath. I was peeling everywhere, shedding nail cells left and right. After my gorgeous adventure I try not to cover myself in plastic, rather I await organic melting instead. 

 

 

WHAT HAPPENS TO RED 

 

Now mother was turning into the earth— there was soil inside her neck and inbetween her joints. The lines in the skin of her knuckles resembled the rows that she cultivated in the vegetable patch, and she was happier than before, but she was also in more pain. The soil granules in her neck caused friction with the swivel of her lucid face. Not everything could receive her much needed light with the same ease before.

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I myself had also begun to cultivate plants, though the soil was still only on the outside of my joints.  I allowed my skin to pigment under the fire in the sky— to depict the equational efforts of my work. My youthful cartilage had not welcomed the dirt-resembling crunches and granules to form inside me yet, but I knew better than to think they would not pearlize one day. I awaited the arrival of these particles as I noted my elbows, knees and ears taking on new shades. Markings that drew attention to sites along my body, hoping to be touched. 

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My nails had grown and toned. A new boy had liked them because it gave my fingers a feminine shape— he liked femininity and he liked subordination. The ways the world had subordinated him made him resonate with women. Their gentleness suited him— he, a sweet lychee. Sweet, juicy and glossy, his brain transcended his translucent skin to emit some of that glow— he kept all this with care and creams. His hide lathering rituals hypnotized me and I hoped to be a flame inside his chest. 

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Access to his fragranced core was rare.  Broken open, his perfume would disapparate and he’d shrivel up in disappointment. His distrust of people with power grew and callouses formed all over his exoskeleton, he was spiked and exhaustive. 

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Cutting my nails threatened him. I cut them to avoid scratching him. I was myself a fearful cornered crocodile, attempting to be vegetarian. The idea of drawing blood from him brought big crocodile tears to my eyes, but my belly was also constantly growling, and my mood was clinically unstable. My jaws snapped too often at the sight of him— sources can’t prove whether they snapped to mouth at him to stay away or to come closer despite the risk of getting eaten. 

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BALANCE. The world needs it.  

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I was moving, morphing, morphine— took on the shape of my condolences, castrated my excellence and teeth. I changed my sharp elegance into wishywashy gloom, blunt preposterousness and excuses. Having dulled my lady weapons, he no longer recognised me. I began to swell and protrude beyond my circumference to get his attention still. This swelling and obtueness crushed his biosphere and we watched ravines of violation and dug-up-truck-tracks turn him into bbarrenn ddestrructionn.

Only our echoes could continue to exist there. 

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The devastation seemed human and unnavoidable. 

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Hindsight reports say the spoiling was logical. The project was rushed, underfunded and opportunistic. A get-rich-quick scheme. A greedy fallacy. I had been avoiding nature from happening for a year— walls, dams and industry were proof of my mismanagement.

 

It had all been built upon the last misgoverned landscape, where dams, still broken, lay abandoned. And that’s just the dam we know of— there is likely to be more evidence of malpractice. There had been a rushing in patching up my landscape from the last excavation, while this new human was trying to settle in it. 

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Mismanagement leads to casualties, I flooded him and myself, in my attempt to control either or both —I would yell for him to leave while selling tours to gorgeous waterfalls. 

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Everyone’s crops and flower beds were destroyed with the flooding and I cried, but that only added to the flooding, and I did not know what else to do but to stop existing.

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The flood became mud and everything took on the shades that come with it. I jumped into its flow and hoped to smear away into earth and exist in solidarity with the dirt. In my attempt, the ground went in my ears, nose and eyes and I so hoped, even for a moment, that I had simply stopped,

and the earth had taken over. 

Still

A Survival annexed my diaphragm, 

sloped it netherwards and forced my lungs to fill, 

against the will of my bronchus, 

my spine lifted me into separation from the dirt

— a seat. 

The land’s mass does not have MY cells and I do not have ITS, 

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I did not belong there.

 

Hands rubbed my eyes and, luckily, scratched my cornea, easing my view of the details of the devastation. My tongue, shrivelled small and shameful, reached for my lips and pedalled the grit in my mouth-cave towards tunnels of digestion. To process this all. I accept it is a grit that will pass through me. Other and foreignly ungraspable.  

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Still a pearl of dirt finds a hiding place in my small intestinal tract (I like to think). Here, I began to resemble mother with her internalized earthen grind—the constant friction that she lives with, again and again. 

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Let’s see what happens to the pearl next.

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— 7th June 2023