The Shape of It

M sent me a package; some books, an old t-shirt, a journal. I don’t speak to her anymore.

I talk to the walls, I talk to my cat, but I am not saying anything, just making sounds because I want to use my voice. I close my eyes and sink into some great hole, and I open them and try to fly again.

There is no one here. They all left. I don’t know where they went, or what happened to them.

You bang your head against the wall to stop everything. Or maybe you don’t—just imagine it, think it. You can’t remember.

A lot of things make me not want to live here anymore—for instance, the way the light abandons us in the winter.

I am struggling to enter—struggling to leave something behind. I am trying to enter a stream flowing near me that I can’t quite reach; I can hear it, I can almost reach out and touch it. It drives me mad to be so close and so immovable.

My hip bone sliding around in the socket, tight and withholding.

Sometimes you want to move forward so badly for so long, by just a little bit, and then when you finally do you overshoot and jump forward by such a long shot that it leaves you looking back, dizzy. I just wanted to move down the street, you say. Not to a whole other country. I just wanted to move to a nicer neighborhood, where I could walk to the grocery store and see my girlfriend for lunch sometimes. Now I never see my girlfriend, now I don’t even have a girlfriend.

I am under water. It is dark, cold, deep—the water—but it doesn’t touch me. I blink and I am in a room again, sitting at a table, dry.

You dream of an animal at night. You are walking through a forest and its eyes appear in the dark. It is many different animals at once; shifting amalgamation of snake, bird, maybe even man. You can only remember clearly the eyes, yellow. The eyes of a predator.

She had a very forceful personality, but I don’t think she recognized that. It came out quietly.

It is very early in the morning. There is a man yelling profanities outside my bedroom window.

Tense, brace yourself for the shock of the rain. Look down at your feet, avoiding puddles. Remember to look up, eyes open seeing, taking in all of the people, watching where you are going. Surrender, allow yourself to relax, accept the cold, the wet, the antithetical.

You are hungry, but everything costs money. Going up the escalator, you remember being a little girl and falling down those flights of stairs. Everything in this city going up, up, up. Hold on tight.

Your friend tells you when you are fifteen that you will know what an orgasm is when you have one. She is right. You spend many years thinking you are having orgasms until you actually have one; a white hot seize that sneaks up and grabs you and holds you tightly with a knife pressed to your neck, leaving you dumb and speechless.

I never learned how to let go of something. How does it begin and how does it end?

Remember that crazy uber driver who told you about his cousin’s death in a car accident? He said something about how there are six seconds out of every day where the mind goes blank and vacant, and the accident happened in those seconds. Six seconds every day that the mind goes somewhere and leaves the body unprotected. That man was crazy. And he handed you some important secret—like stumbling upon some undiscovered biblical language, some tenet of a religion you were meant to practice. You thought, Oh yes, I belong to something.

Something bad happened, and I became evil. I think. That could be why everyone left.

The bottom layer of feeling in me is saying the yellow of the train platform is important.

M always called me sensitive. I admit that I am. I feel things deeply and I feel them forever, somewhere.

My cat really wants my attention right now, but I’m busy. But I do love him. I want to smoke a cigarette but not really actually, just the idea of a cigarette.

I knew what was going to happen, and I showed up anyway.

The feeling of being an unreliable narrator. The feeling of being cut in half. The feeling of shock when she touches you. You can’t start at the beginning of the story because the story starts here. The feeling of becoming water and rushing out in every direction because your walls are disappearing and can no longer contain you.

What is the meaning of your life in a room by yourself? The first answer you get back is nothing. You are trying to wait for another answer.

She made me want to stay.

I have become bigger than the things that used to hold me captive. That is a cocky thing to say. Surely, I will be punched in the gut soon and taught a lesson.

Time is always happening and changing everything. Time is a circle.

I’m sorry I didn’t come home with anything because I spent too long staring at the flowers in the grocery store window, and it started raining. When I said I wanted to kiss that pretty girl at the bar, what I really meant was that you lit fire to my insides. You left me alone in your room and I wanted to try on your clothes, your shoes, your eyes.

The piece of copper wire on the street, in its white plastic coating, looks like the worm that came out of your cat's stomach over a year ago. Imagine stepping on it, soft white innards like pastry cream spilling out under your shoe.

Sometimes you are possessed by a spirit and it wants you to say something. Of course you cannot break the ground—you are walking on it.

My friend kept feeding me drugs. We were at the beach. She was dancing and having a good time, while I was melting into a rock under the sun, crying over the depth of love—like an ocean inside of me, waves of it pulling me out and under, lifting me to the sky, then slamming me into rocks and beating me bloody.

You are afraid you cannot see when a person is bad and will use you.

Oh, girl. You think there is no story unless you are in love.

Show me what happens when you get to the other side, when you are finally able to cut yourself free. Give me the feeling of being limber, soft and content.

I am halfway through this period and already I feel it ending. It could be a beginning. It depends where on the circle you choose to start.

It happens by accident. You meet a man. You can’t see what comes next.

We go down the stairs and into a room that looks like hell. We go into a basement where nothing exists anymore.

Do not sleep at night and drink dark, black coffee in the morning. Move through the world like performing a dance—with fluid, sure-footed grace. Every movement divine and instinctive, revelatory.

Am I writing this down, or are these my thoughts?

He teaches you new words for pain that you never say out loud. The color yellow, once, when you think your arm might be about to break; remember quickly you don’t have good enough health insurance for this kind of thing.

The ocean is always trying to have sex with you. The beach is always dying and being born.

This morning I am very late to work. I choose to believe that the old man waving the strange device around on the street is cleansing the energy for us. Rather nice of him, actually.

We throw our bodies into metal machines and shoot them across the sky, wondering more about our inability to reach out and touch each other.

You are not soft anymore. You are something sharp and acrid, chemical reaction. You are silver, static, rushing noise. You are the color on the train car, the light mixing with the metal and the everything flying by.

I don’t think we spoke out loud; I think we were speaking with our minds the entire time.

Everything loud and jarring, dialed up to ten. Bright garish colors, red everywhere.

A bird, like an omen, is following you everywhere. Black, shining teal in the light, with gold yellow flecks all over its chest. It is trying to tell you something, and you are doing a bad job hearing it.

I don’t always know what to do with myself; I might be doing something more important if I was loving someone.

Finishing what you start is a good quality.

I lost my cat. And then I found him, but I lost him again. He kept running away from me. I was relieved; he wanted to be gone!

You are so full of shame and magic, and here it is okay. When he rubs his junk all over your face, your eyes, your lips, before pushing it into your mouth, you feel like a garbage can for love.

I like it when people let me talk so I can find my way to what I’m trying to say.

There are certain shapes that are important. They repeat themselves. They guide things into existence. Look around. There are only so many ways for a thing to exist; it must be held by something. Could you survive without being held?

Don’t let go of it until it has pulled you somewhere.

You continue to stretch and bend your form, plunge your body into heat—solid, liquid, gas. Evaporation. Rain. Clay, damp and soft, molding in your hands. Dry out in the sun. Hard, brittle, crack, erosion. The thing is you love the heat, love the way it feels on your skin, love what it does to your body.

I know I am supposed to keep going. I get a little tired after a while, even though I still have things to say.

To be enamored, completely, with the moment. In love with the lip stain on the glass, the single flower opening itself up on the barren tree, singing spring.

You keep wanting to say I love you, I love you, I love you. Not because you love him, but because it is the dirtiest thing you can think of to say.

All I ever want to do is plunder the marrow of life and marvel at its taste, its consistency.

When you stand in the ocean, you are touching something that touches the other side of the world. You are inside of something endless.

I am starting to see the great neutrality of everything. I no longer know how to humanize myself.

I wanted someone to hold me and catch me while I fell, so that I could let myself go completely. Someone to contain me while I spilled, flooded. He did that for me. I didn’t even have to ask. I had my fingers inside myself, and he put his fingers in too and told me to keep going, and it was like he was listening to them.

It’s okay if they get it wrong sometimes. I get it wrong sometimes.

Tree, thank you for being a tree. I could cry. Song, thank you for being a song. Sun, thank you for being the sun shining down on me. And all the people being people. Thank you, thank you. I just can’t thank you enough.

It is instinctive. I know it, the shape of it, by heart.

Please don’t resent me when this is over. And you see that I never had a story to tell you. I never had anything to say; just useless words, clutter, things I looked around and saw that I could use. I just needed you to see it. I needed to teach it to you, to take you around and along its edges. So that you would know it, recognize it.

Don’t worry, this isn’t an apology. This isn’t retroactive. It’s all happening now.

Something lighter in the air. I step off the train and wake up into everything feeling alright. I can’t write about it now. I have to go and be a part of it.

The narrative emerges later, I swear. For now, just pay attention.

Emma Allbright (she/they) is a Houston-born poet and fiction writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. With art, she explores sexuality, intimacy, limitation, grief, the endless well of the human spirit, and the shifting line between fiction and reality. Her work has appeared in Glass Mountain, The Olivetree Review, and elsewhere.