XII.
I feel it all. Gas pains, flattened against a bed one night broken-in. A death in Toulouse, on a roundabout near the airport, left ear folded forward, face flattened, the incomparable, quick pop of impact, the ringing of boxed ears. Watching a man ring a bird's neck, watching noises, guttural, and a sick pulse between the ears and throat and stomach. The swelling chest of panic.
I always thought reality would look different, that awakeness would feel less like a dream. That Real would not include TV static in the visuals, nor lasting, lasting impressions of the previous; highly colorful after-images, as part of the picture, the picture lasting into itself, the moment taking another moment to finish up, and another one; it never ends every time a moment finishes, ceases enough to be captured and last. I thought real would look solid, would look whole and complete, and now I think that seeing the sky or the windows or the walls or the sheets, seeing the greatest, most upwards winding growth, or the darkest and downwards and sickest something, blackest chasm---seeing a thing or happening in its entirety, without billions of tiny resonating holes, but filled with billions of tiny dots of what's Really There, that it would crack me open like a nut. The utter completeness of the picture would fill me to a place past full, and blow open the doors of mind and feeling with a wind as unstoppable as the tide, the moon, the earth the sun. Because Everything, a person can't contain and still know; they must be Open, and no more a container than a teacup that's been split in two.
So that there's no having. That's where we have it all.
I feel it all, I know it. Peeling sunburn, peeling skin, elastic, wet and burning beneath the dead-not-quite. Raw flesh, exposed, drying out; every drying, dying clump of cells screaming out in blood-curdling silence, in itchy agony, screams that for some reason can only be heard by the greater being they compose. And the parts, perhaps. In not a sound that comes to us, to me, but suddenly, as the more or less direct way of feeling, of existing. The suffering of living, it is parts of me dying, sometimes violently. And that is healing, and growing, and I can't help but feel like the wedding roses from the night before last. Thankfully roses are not like humans, who generally seek some purpose and are saddened by the loss of it. Humans, who would not easily bear the wedding rose's life---to grow for months and months and be sentenced to death the moment before blossom, sentenced to death away from its roots, to not be remembered as an individual, or remembered very often, or at all, or as what was important. The wedding rose, whose service to the external world would be fleeting and not Necessary; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.
I was a witch that night. I tore off the outer petals, drying, dying, of a huge number of white wedding roses, I tore until they looked newer and more closed again. Then I plunged their stems beneath the kitchen faucet, and severed them where I saw fit, so that they could drink more easily, huddled in a fishbowl, flowerfood and water.
I was a witch because alone, I alone decided to have a death ritual, to make a ceremony of the dwindling fire in the pit out back and the petals I had torn off the roses, which in all fairness were not that dead. Which were quite alive, and would've still drunk, til the last living cells had lost their connection to the whole, til the water could no longer reach them, til they were cut off and isolated and surrounded by cells that were no longer living, til they had no choice but to follow the parts, follow the whole into death.
On two plates I heaped all the ivory petals and picked leaves and severed ends, and took them outside to their death; I sat by the cauldron and tried to really Feel each petal before I fed it to the fire, which was hungry, which ate each thoroughly without recognition of its own last meal. The wet stems and dripping leaves crackled and pop-sparked, giving rise to a nutty-smelling smoke; the petals, soft like skin but not soft like petals, perished quietly, lonely. Most petals I kissed, some died a little more memorably---stuck on a burning twig, lasting longer on the back of a log. I was a witch for doing it, because it felt a little like a holocaust, of things that aren't like people. Even the fire died, trying to burn itself.
The roses huddled in the fishbowl were unwittingly thrown out the next morning; it's a good thing roses aren't like people.
