The Velvet Inbetween

I wanted the voices to be normal again Scratching beneath my pillows at night To hear any sound but the sounds a mind can make Vivid words in a drifting mindscape Hardly known to me.

My eyes are red From the sleep I’ve lost Tossing and turning and learning

My hands just shake One, then both Tremendously, greatly— Then suddenly, not at all.

But the world didn’t sleep When I lost that gift. Memory didn’t leave me When it failed to work: And when all couldn’t be seen The dark blood churning I turned to the ever-burning stars.

The fabric between those glowing points of light was eternal and far and endless— Spiraling hopes and dreams of worlds I couldn’t know were frozen in light I’d never see reach me They stood and they stood And they never once moved anchorpoints to an entire universe—

—yet, somehow, the stars could never hold me. Skittering visions of a pounding pulse Hands only belaying every action— every notion— with the moments between the searing terror a nervous void of thought.

The things I knew became things unknown, and my Past came to light before I learned it wasn’t all My world narrowed, then cracked and burned a supernovic living thing, barely still held together—

And I forgot that I forgot that I ever could have understood every single part of me.

The shards examined did me no justice just hurt and stabbed and burned; the fragments showed things I could become if I stayed uncaring and self-reliant Ourself remained important, but Ourself became enlightened.

I pulled the threads together, tying even as I cut them

I could only weave so much in hand with fingers still barely shaking—

but I stopped to take a shuddering breath and looked back up at the stars.

The velvet in-between them then had still remained intact, unchanging

| Elysia Koury

from the last time I looked at it As if it could barely see The tiny specks within it; Gas and heat fused into metal died deaths that killed the thousands yet that light would never reach me. Futile as it was, I knew them well, these nighttime points I saw walking down the concrete to my ensured hell I held onto the brilliance of what once, for them, was.

They never left when all else left me— in the end, I held onto that— Yet even then, when I gazed to them, the stars could never hold me.

Broken and failing Somehow still flailing for my position— a dissolving position, one I never even wanted, tainted with the acid of indecision and denial and regret— that, despite itself, remained my only option.

Crumbling foundations are hardly ever foundations But the bedrock underneath is only revealed through those last stones disappearing into the void which is why the last of which I stand on must finally rot away.

This doesn’t mean, though, who I was— fear spikes and twists at the thought of that— rather, so, the misconceptions that arise from a closed-looping mind. I bit back the tears From years ago Just to look at the sky, to float To not mourn the deaths of billions-old light so that I could know them to be forever.

And those tears fall, now, though those stars do blur, that black between them remains constant.

Their lives are constant records of their Pasts Of how they keep moving on The ‘verse may see them long after they are dead, only to remember them for what they saw until even that winks out.

They were right, the voices within my head: That gas could burn and the ‘verse could turn But the stars never held me— they anchored me so that I could fall

into their Velvet Inbetween.