The darkness knows me. I know it. We danced together many nights, when I would smoke cigarettes and pop pills and snort powder and laugh at shadows and your flesh on my tongue was cinnamon and life was good, when I was high, when the darkness and I danced, when it would spill out of me, black hair in my fists, and it curled around my long fingers, like a centipede, underneath my fingernails and down, down into my nail-beds -- under my skin and into the black blackness of my veins. It leaks still from my skull like greasy oil on my pale thin skin.
I remember the darkness, but not too well, because some nights I would breathe it, pull myself into it, falling, too deep for cognition or anything that would resemble a memory with more substance than a paper lamp whose body is pressed so hard against my own that it crumbled in my hands and I let fall into the dirt beneath my bare body, a carcass, a husk, a hull, but one that I didn’t see for empty. The darkness is warm in my hand. It scares me. It runs from me in threads small and skinny as silk, and it comes back in waves, so cold, like black ink, like Poe’s bird, like your black eyes, sightless, stinging me – in them I can see my own black heart.
I can feel it. Pressing me into the ground. It smells like salt and whiskey. Ultra violence. Maybe I am being dramatic. I breathe out honey and poppy flowers and it stains my teeth red, I smile and taste you in my mouth, where you live, in memory with the darkness and all the black inside of me, with the ink, and the ashes, and the thin bone barrier of my membranes. I can always feel it, but I don’t know it, this darkness. I don’t know it’s dancing, its two-step, its waltz, its cadence, the pressure of its fingers on my waist, leaving holes where it touches me that glow like fireflies that I have never known, I have never seen, I have never felt (I am too sincere with this darkness, this color; this black).
literally could not find any other way to post this anywhere else. Thank you so much @lioness for starting this fun project! I don't know if she has posted anything about it on SG, but you can find more info about the writing challenge at lairoflioness.com!
