The Drowning Man

Black and hollow, an echo in memory ebbing through my mind like a sluggish tide, caught in the brown-blue wake of slowly rolling years. It’s easy to drift when you’ve nothing left. Easy to sink with the weight of meaningless dreams. You’re just rendered terminal by the unreachable horizon – flat and featureless. It’s somehow calming to know it’s over, a kind of salvation in giving up. Failure has it’s upside.
+++++But I sink in her. I drown in her colourless eyes, tangled in the matted black of her hair. Wrapped in the cheap plastic sack of her white limbs, my body like butter, melting and going slack. No more.
+++++She presses her lips to mine and my lungs fill with the poisonous waters of her soul, a tainted, soft cold medicinal taste, like lead in the tap water. I feel heavy and light at the same time, as my thoughts and memories begin to evaporate, becoming the ocean that engulfs me, and my body deadens, dragging me down beneath the surface of those languid, slow waves.
+++++She moves in low frequencies, the song of a black hole pulsing millions of light years away. I see her through telescopes, hear her in radio waves, always mediated through fractured translators and machinery that could never cope. Her voice is the ocean crashing on rocks, a dripping tap in an echo chamber, reverberating through my skull.
+++++Her body feels pleasantly hard, pushing against me, the pressure of so many fathoms crushing my ribs, forcing the air from my lungs. Her skin is cold, damp with salt water; it runs from her mouth now, into mine. Her whole body heaves and writhes with the effort of breathing, a tidal movement that ebbs and flows above me.
+++++I look up at her face and feel myself vanishing into her eyes, into her soul. Blackness is a comfort blanket, as safe as a body bag and as reassuringly final. It surrounds me on the bed, creeping into the room, under the door, through the windows with the rain driving hard against the glass in sheets of grey. A monochromatic vision descends, but then I always see her in black and white, there is very little colour to her. Sometimes her lips glow violently red and she spits ink like a bureaucratic serpent, coiled in the corner hissing.
+++++I sink deeper down, falling through layers of colder and darker water, further into unseen realms of her mind. She smiles a little at me, her black lips curling, her hair floating around her head as she looks down at me through the water. For a moment I’m unsure if I’m looking up at her, or watching her sink. A moment of panic at the thought of me losing her makes me gag, but she hushes me with a finger to my lips and a cold hand on my forehead. Water fills my lungs as I give myself to her again and time pushes through my pores into the black ink of her ocean.
+++++Her will is gravitational, she pulls me into her orbit and I’m powerless to leave her, even if I wanted to. The closer I get the more intense is her vibration, the bone-shuddering humming that blurs my vision and fogs my head. She sighs like planet eater, and her eyes bore into everything with a myriad radiations, scorching skin and brickwork, melting glass. I feel her touch like freezer burn, her kiss like moments of broken memory thrust into my brain, sharp and angled.
+++++Soft and glacial I feel her body in slow moments of running water and rusty sinks; a dirty stream with a dead dog. Her tongue seeks out my mouth, tastes of lipstick and salt water, a trace of the metallic, coppery like blood. Her passion is a cold-heat, a fever in night time signs of winter storms and frosted windows, a slow moving ocean rolling on and on, never ending or seeing the land.
+++++And the constant rushing, the static crashing of waterfalls, pressing me further down, beneath her weight, her deliberate undulations, her surface water body, blurred, momentarily unseen, but always heard.
+++++I pitch on the waves, on the edge of falling completely through the web of consciousness and into that welcoming bliss of eternity. She keeps me there, bobbing up and down, back and forth, her pale naked body a high contrast white, stark, bleached like bone in the desert. This limbo is torture, and she knows it, her smile as black as the darkness crawling like a flood of insects over the floor, the walls, the ceiling.
+++++I reach a hand up to her and she guides it to her throat, my hand closing around it. My head rises and ducks beneath waves, glimpses of bruised sky and thin daylight. I’m too weak, no strength remains in my muscles and my hand slides uselessly down her body, over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.
+++++My ears are full of dirty floodwater, muddy and clotted. I can hear her laughing, occasionally breaking through like a weak radio signal. She leans forward, her hair over my face, a black deluge pouring over me and starving me of air. It’s like being caught in the roar of a great black cataract, choking on the thick darkness.
+++++She is my dying star. My bottomless ocean, bleak and unyielding. Her heart beats against my body in a rhythmic pulse, sending out x-rays across space. Her aura is an energy field, caught in the wake of her immense gravitational pull.
+++++She slides off the bed, her image jump-cutting in the monochrome, a flash of brilliant white. The waters close in around me, flooding over me like rain into a storm drain. She watches as I sink slowly, a pale frozen angel in the ink of an oceanic night. So many fathoms in her mass, so many light years in her eyes. Black. Deep. Silent.
+++++I’m engulfed in her. Forever I am drowning in her.
+++
+++
+++
+++
Kenny Mooney lives in Glasgow, Scotland. He used to develop software for a major banking institution, but has escaped that world and is now at a crossroads in his life, seeking a new direction. He likes David Lynch and early Cure albums, beaches in the middle of a storm and drinking tea. He exists online at www.dragline.co.uk.