14
creative writing
Fracture By Molly Phillips before I realise that I am dreaming Falling i am walking to the tower, (the same I walk round every day to watch the waves come home), and all is as it should be except it’s quieter, grayer and My limbs pinned to my sides so I cannot even writhe, worm-like in the quieter gray and and I realise. The air does not feel like air, it feels like nothing, I feel like nothing, detached from the consequences of who I am and who I was i am nothing and I like it and When did I learn to be nothing? More than that, when did I learn to like it? i used to be someone and enjoy it. long for it. The ground is too far to be sensical I am waiting for now I’m nothing and I like it. Ground myself in sense, in remnants of my life, what my life was And I wake. I awake into what my life has now become. He is beside me, he is always beside me, asleep on the stool he’s spent the night perched on like a bird, but folded over, forehead on the straw mattress, accidental sleepbreath slow and sweet. I think about what I thought. I never thought I’d see him again, but now he’s there and I see him so clearly. I could reach out and smooth the hair that sprouts so softly from his crown. The sky outside the window is grey, and I am falling again, flexing my hands into branches at my side. My hands are bony, the veins are green and bold, with torn fingernails altering the line of their once confident edges. He stirs beside me, to lift his head and turn, but does not wake. I think about the moment that I knew I was going to die. I cannot find it. I cannot find a lot of moments I thought I’d made. If they exist they do so in halves and quarters. I think I exist in halves and quarters myself now that there’s light again. I push myself into a sitting position. He sleeps on, so I slip out of the bed. Every movement feels wrong, each half of my body lagging like it barely exists. Looking out the window. I see where it all Where it Where it happened and parts of memories try to filter back through the recesses of my pounding skull. They do not succeed. They are fractured and they themselves are hairline cracks in the bone of thought. In the dream I was no one and I liked it but I can feel my splintered self becoming someone again because it’s over, isn’t it? Even though I feel like it will all fall away like a baby bird from a nest in moments, it doesn’t. I am a person now. I wasn’t, for a moment, but I am. What memories I can make to replace the ones I’ve lost. Must be something big. Something important, to have lost it so easily. Grapple with it, the weight of something forgotten, something that has passed and disappeared, yet somehow is heavier than what remains.
