Photography: Cheratte, Liège (2016) by Jenn von Montigny
You stood back, halted. Refusing to move until your tread becomes one of lightness. The crowd will have to wait until the teardrops have taken the same shape – as you keep telling yourself.
But regardless of the number of months having passed, lightness is nowhere near imaginable reach, and instead agony smothers you.
Your eyes always darting, scanning, searching each room for enshadowed corners, for dusty cobwebs. Not because you think you’ll find anything significant, but because you’d like to become them: something that ties pieces together, but without being noticed by eyes unwelcome.
Lightness is proving unattainable.
[ – ]
If you had any courage left, you could take part in a miracle. The sort of miracle that allows one to be generous with their time and fully accept the all the moments that pass so quickly.
But you find it dull, banal even, to assign any value to these instances simply for not having hurt you, and so you don’t.
The obsession with achieving your lightened tread continued on to inhibit at first gradually, then completely, your capacity for giving appreciation in the very slightest for any environment you breathed in.
You hadn’t the faintest clue that this amount of pressure would reach the point where it manifested as blood stains on your finger nails, the forming of white foam on your eye lines, or a bully’s voice that constantly counted up numbers, loquacious, livid, loud. Looping.
Look at you, spoke insanity, you haven’t advanced. Not a single inch. Tell me, what do you have to say for yourself?
Nothing, you sigh, with an audible heaviness that’s charged your eyes and voice alike. Exchanges with insanity do, after all, come at a cost. One more breath exhaled here, and its grip could’ve swallowed me whole, is what you’d have liked to add, but stating this out loud may have made it come true, and so –
Absolutely nothing.
A S P H Y X I A 