Silvercatcher

June 17, 2010

Posted by Madeline on Jun 17 2010

I may be curled fetal, or I may be running, but I know there is nothing beneath me but a broad expanse of soft, dissonant chords and crooked images, half-hearted allusions and whispered sentences. Is there a word for this? There’s a feeling, halfway between heart and lung, a feeling that tugs down the corners of my eyes, and you say I look sad. But though I may push a fist against the feeling, it is flesh and sinew there, a surprisingly sturdy frame to cradle what stretches inside.

There is no word for this, for the clinical term you suggest can not describe something so feline, when hospitals and electric lights seem so bright and flat in comparison. In the poor kingdom of my mind, words march past like a tiny cavalry of soldiers that faint and swoon at the first sign of the battle that awaits. To assign a label, a classification, a definition of this feeling is to pitch each toy figure, each hard and plastic string of words, into the jaws of a monster that grows stronger with each blow to its heart. The battle is a massacre now, but I stay to watch the soldiers march on.

If I close my eyes, there is a gray shape, misshapen and shadowed, with a jagged black edge on one side and a smooth dove-colored curve on the other. Wary of the serrated edge, I run my mind’s fingers along the curve and feel pain, like the metallic and deadly fans of a beautiful or perhaps fictitious culture that I recall from my childhood. Watch, and the shape begins to writhe and curl, like an amoeba beneath a microscope, like an insect fried beneath another lens. When a pinhole opens in the center, sucking the sallow, shrinking shape inwards upon itself, downward into a vacuum of abandoned words and attempts, the edges pucker and smoke, and I put my fingertips to my eyelids to force them open.

But the feeling remains. It’s a self-portrait, and a massacre at best.