Astronauts & Bedtime Stories

creatingaquietmind:

Be in love. Be in love with the air you’re unconsciously grasping for and the way you’ve forgotten the names of your body parts, the way every piece of you isn’t a piece at all but just one pulsing organ over which you have relinquished control. Give in. You are a vessel for autonomous cells to prove that they can be trusted, that they don’t need conscious help or guidance or permission to create something earthshaking. Shake. Be in love with how graceful you are when you want to be, how you can’t fathom concerning yourself with the movement of your hips or left arm placement or the right way to cross your legs when you sit, the concept of arms and legs and torsos extinct in these moments. Now, there are no parts, no pieces, no organs that exist independently of each other so don’t think of your dampened Florida-morning skin; don’t feel your heart but know that it’s there, ticking then beating then thumping then losing a battle against the rhythm of your body. See everything in snapshots and portraits until the colors run together, until the world becomes abstract. Do not think of befores, or afters, or right nows, let your mind go blank, go black, think ‘nothing’ so fervently that nothing becomes something, that nothing becomes everything. Add pressure. Let your toes curl under and grab handfuls of flesh in acknowledgment, pinch it and knead it and let it fill the half-moons of your fingertips. Leave your manmade dimples on his back in remembrance, a memorial honoring bodies and biology. Become obsessed with tension and become obsessed with relieving it; become aware of muscles that didn’t exist an hour ago, muscles you didn’t know you had until they became locked in anticipation. More pressure. Lose your feet and your hands and know what their disappearance means (hold it), know their vitality has been redirected and (hold it) it’s coursing through your veins now, heading straight for your fault lines and (hold it) your breath quickens and (let) your eyelids flash wildly as the pressure breaks (go), seismic waves unleashed and reverbed and preventing the world from spinning on its axis

if

only

for

a

second

and now the quake has come and gone and you’re living in aftershock territory, subject to shaking for minutes, hours. Give the hairs on your neck permission to stand down, give your eyes permission to open; let numbness fade from your fingers and toes. Exhale the air you once loved and return it back to the universe, return back to earth.

(Source: ohbelowme)