to be drowned in the sea of imagining [rc - day one]

[heather - d2 [mylee]]

K  I  P  T  Y  N

When Tex and Cain insisted we keep moving, I threw a fit. I can’t do it, I had protested, my voice coming out high and whiny, clearly desperate. It’s not that I had been comfortable, or had even settled into the spot on the cave floor where I had writhed around curled in the fetal position, trying to find a way to fold my body that caused the least amount of pain, but the thought of movement felt impossible, incomprehensible even. I had begged them, pleaded for another hour or so of rest, but they made sound points about the amount of daylight left, of how we needed to navigate in the light while we were still entirely unfamiliar with our new world. So I had switched my plea, and begged them, Just leave. Just fucking leave me here so I can rot.

I heard the deep sigh, the shuffle of feet across the cave floor. And then I felt his arms and hands gently working their way underneath me, shifting me to sitting and then hooking carefully under both arms and heaving me to my feet. We made our way out of the cave, and each time I felt my legs waver, one of them was there, breaking the start of a fall before I got too close to the ground. Each time, I’m sorry, and little to no response, the feeling of my uselessness creeping higher and higher up my throat.

We shuffled along in silence, quick pauses to catch a breath or shift supplies from one side to the next, and I had tried to focus on their breathing, to know it on sound alone. But as we traveled farther and farther from the mouth of the cave, I felt the focus drain from my body, the only thoughts crossing my mind turned to the thought of pain and suffering, how long I could outlast my body working against me.

The sudden distraction of water had been welcome then, clear and violent in its movement. In my mind, the reasoning was sound and articulated, numbered reasons and logistics as to why we should stop here for the night. But the reality is this: I collapsed alongside the bank and threw my left hand into the water, the cold sending a jolt of feeling along my spine. Can we--please, let’s just stop here for the night.

~

No real protests had been made. Now, my body rests half in the water and half out, Tex a safety line behind me making sure I don’t get pulled into the current. From here, I can see straight through the water to the pebbles strewn along the bed of the stream. Distorted by the water, I’m sure this body is not my body, or what it once was, just like how each time I looked at myself in the glass of a house’s window while Robin picked a lock, I saw less of myself in what looked back. I’d touch my jaw, or the stubble I hadn’t bothered to take off, and I’d wonder how there was anything in me that could last the rest of a lifetime. Now, it feels appropriate to have wondered, and to still be haunted by it, the muscles in my thighs and calves already appearing atrophied and wasting with the passing seconds, being carried away with this river that was no longer the same river I first stepped into, or sat in now, or now, or now.

Terrifying, the nature of change. Small and unnoticeable or the whole bank collapsing into the current that shaped it. I’d thought Tex quiet and uninterested when I’d first met him, and now I can only focusing on the feeling of his hands gripping my shoulders protectively, how he and Cain had kept me from dragging myself along the ground the whole way here.

I can’t turn to look at him, so I look at the bank across from us and say to it, Why didn’t you leave me? You and Cain could have made it so much farther today.

[ table: pogue ]

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