There was only one way for her to get across the murky waters of her river-mind. She set to the difficult and bleedingfingertips task of winding rough fiber to rope to wood she had severed from living trees with only her callouses and pungent leather boots as leverage. Everything she had managed to accomplish in the last five months of her life: the fires of a forge creating fevered feelings, the hard and unwavering beliefs of a zealot converted to love from atheistic longing for nothingness to be truth, the umbrellas she'd held aloft to winds so strong they ripped inside out and shredded and bent metal leaving shattered plastic handles behind in her grasp (to be saved and used later in the building of a raft she never thought she'd need) had been swept away by the churning and silty flow of the unbearable force behind his rejection.
While she worked, she sometimes cried. Other times (most times) she made no noise at all, nor were the two mutually exclusive. She set to the task like a pilgrim woman, a pioneer muscling her way through the hard frozen ground to dig a pit for poles and mortar and fire, the things she felt her body were made of. Her teeth were clenched, grim; her eyes grew hard and dark and glittery as they were sunk into the purpling bruises above her cheeks, below her brow. Sleepless and yet not sleepy, each moment that passed was one more moment she was rushed further downstream from the aching, yellowing memory of everything about him - smells, glances, mouthed propositions while everyone else in the house puttered, slept, prepared cocktails or snacks. Her desire for his lanky frame, her need for his voice pouring frothing honey-juice into the heretofore clogged, waxen holes of her ears, her craving for a bite of his bellyflesh, peppered with wiry black hairs and the skin beneath pale, quivery velvet: all of these things turned rigid and angry and hot in her gut. It wasn't as though she were a stranger to being dumped at the edge of some unfriendly and mud-wallowed riverbank at the end of her usefulness. But this was the first time she felt she hadn't deserved it. This was the first time she had ever felt as though the small of her back was crinkled up from bending backwards. This was the first time her throat hurt from uttering words she never believed she meant until they'd already been said and heard and disregarded. All the other times, all the other people - the tall ones and thick ones and bright ones and sluggish ones; the artists and rugby players and LSD dealers and firewalkers and construction workers and slackers-turned-cafe-royalty - they'd left her too. This river wasn't new. This river had been flowing all along, deep in the caverns of grey and pink matter, not that any of it mattered, so what a funny noun to use.
But his car had seemed safer and warmer than any of the cars before his. The construction worker would leave drywall dust in his seat as he leapt across the front seat at her reclining form. His hardhat would slip off his forehead and mark her own forehead with a deep red crease as he thrust a tool so hard, so cold, so fearless and sure of it self, into her dry and barren box. The LSD dealer threw endless jealous fits while he drove in erratic patterns all over the road, which at the time felt flattering and romantic, but soon became a disease that infected her own addled vision of the world, and turned her into someone who would never trust that she was good enough for you, or anyone - the demons he saw in her face were real, because she saw them in his, too. The rugby player could chew an aluminium beer can up in his mouth without drawing blood as he piloted his dad's caddilac around the suburbs, and the day that he bruised every square inch of skin on her generous breasts was the day she clamped his mouth shut on the metal and watched as he struggled to breathe, then swallow, then laughed when later his bowel movements forced screams from his throat like the ones she'd refused to allow out of her own mouth as he'd brutalized her; and more laughter when he ran from the house, leaving a toilet bowl full of blood because yes, if you are a nasty girl with aching tits, you laugh at gory shit like that. The queen of the cafe had only her height - 6'4" - and a good haircut going for her. Even the minivan she drove, the drugs she took were all stolen or borrowed. She only feigned her love of coke, the creative arts, and women, to play with every hanger-on that needed to be a part of someone's court, and now the pioneer raft-maker knew and could see clearly, how fake every moment with the queen had been. The firewalker, clearly the lover with the most exciting sounding job and who drove a smoke-belching diesel-powered pick-up, was only using fire as a cover. Inside, her spirit was a limpit, a nudibranch, a sea cucumber - impotent, cold, damp as davy jones' locker, without flame at all. Overcompensation at it's finest. And so her disdain and ever-present judgement, even while she was a willing participant, was also her armour in all of these relationships. She didn't deserve these lovers, this love, because she didn't really love them. Her actions, her willingness, they were all nothing but numb motions that kept her barely afloat, barely registering, a somewhat worthwhile human being with what appeared to be interpersonal relationships with others, however dysfunctional. At least, oh, at least she wasn't fucking alone. A death worse than fate, that is. With this thought she chuckled, and the noise that emitted from her raw and infected throat scared her. Her voice was gone, like every other part of her that had been worth anything at all.
She looked deep into the lines of her hands, which had gone blue-ish and numb and cracked from the hard work of binding her feet to the still-green poles meant to brace her above the current of the dirty river before her. All she saw was the blood pulsing underneath. Sometimes death and death-throes would bring bodily fluids like blood, semen, urine, out from their hiding places in the body. She wondered how long she would be able to contain the rest of her. Every other part of herself had been released into the universe already. Breath. The light from her eyes and heart and hair folicles. Gas. Flakes of skin. Parasites, a billion on the tip of each baby fingernail. And that is just the physical. Who knows what was left of her spirit, now, after everything else was gone? Sometimes she felt so empty she forgot that it wasn't always that way. All of those who had come before him, they had seen how full she was and had longed to lay in it, submerge in it, feel it on their skin and over their mouths and through their waggling toes and fingers.
It was at this point in her thoughts her raft was complete, her bindings tightened and secure. No matter what rough breeze, what brute of a wave or current should thrust against her and her wooden brace, she would remain attached. The raft's fate was her fate. Rapids, rocks, storms, she would go to sea in a sieve, just to transverse whatever evil lay beneath the surface, just to fully surrender and know one way or the other what the universe had in wait for her. A test with no grading curve. A dream where the ending was known before sleep's arrival. She used a pole to shove herself away from shore. In the trees and their shadows there, she saw some people, people she maybe knew, rolling their eyes and clicking their tongues. "You don't know the half of it," she thought, trying to ignore their doubt and shame of her as she felt the current pull on the raft's wood under her feet. "This river, flowing so fast and full of mud, is all of my dirt, all of my mess. If I make it across here, intact and still breathing, whether the raft survives the trip or not, will tell me the truth. Am I here to stay or will every moment I glimpse but don't grasp love...I mean, Love, with a capital L, and instead see it float off to take shelter in someone else's harbour, will I drown like a sailor from a poem in my own dirt? In my own currents? In my own self-obsession? Or will I float on green logs and hemp rope and scramble to the other side, untouched, and ready for something new and newer? Will the rough water harden me, or will it wash away hardness? Will I breathe or will I sink?"
Each lick of water, small or large, that heaved over the sides of the raft pressed her clothes to her skin, her hair to her face. Rain came and passed. Oars creaked in their rope casings as she pulled and pushed, her shoulders and back fiery, her head full of mucous and sound, twigs glued with pasty water to her bare feet and cheeks, her ankles bled in their gruff bindings. The river roared, the sand moved, the eyes in the trees kept rolling, and she realized that's all they were capable of. Determined and unwavering, her goal loomed. When you think of her, ask yourself: did she sail into warm, healing goodweatherbliss or did she tumble from the raft into rapid, jagged stonesaltysorrow. It is not yours to know, but it is yours to wonder.
So wonder.
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