Core of Cold

And so, I find myself falling inside, inexorably drawn towards the core. Like tepid water that gathers at the bottom of a sink, filled with the fragments of all that it was used to clean (cups, plates, knives, wounds, pain), inexorably held in the hands of a newborn mother, permanently thralled in the arms of a never-shaking father. There is cold where I am, always the cold. I was bred to fear it, to slowly withdraw from the boundless tundra of inside. Flames of self worth and goals were supposed to burn away the snowness of Introvertia, to leave the ground ready for sowing. But I haven't. I haven't withdrawn, I haven't lit the flames. They burn, like the stars, with a distant fire that is too hot to be called cold, but too cold to be called embracing. The ground is ready but there will be no sowing.

There will be no sowing. I fail to see how the wheat, flowers, palm trees, olive groves, silent orchards of sweet-too-sweet apples, will take root here. There is only cold, only the self-hugging gesture of solitude. A half-smile is my plow, a swept-back tear is my rake. Alone, I am the farmer of my own apartness, the tender of the garden of discontent. At the weekend market, they will all have bounties to display, boothfuls of embraces, stocks of smiles and well meant words. I will empty sacks, worn out cloth barely holding the non-commodity that is the only thing I could ever fill them with. The non-commodity of starkness, the unattainables of who I am.

The unattainables of who I am. This is what it is all about. In the end, the silent gesture that I would choose were I forced to choose a defining one, would be the shrug. But how can I be like that? Harder, how can I become that? And thus, I wander. The ocean, the core, the void, the silence, the Lictor, the King, the wings, the cicada swarm, it's all just facets of the same shrug, faces of the same chill. The chill of my own thoughts. Like a child before a freezing bowl of ice, all that is possible for me is to shove my hands into it, to feel the frost, pain, memory, the shed moments of the past, the discarded words of paths frozen to apathy. All I can do is shove my hands into it and be burned once again, at the core of cold. The core of cold.

The core of cold. Somewhere off the middle of the void, that core is held. In the slightly not centre of energies I must never fathom, that core is ever-frozen, perma-silenced. All the rest, is a dance. The skirting of the waves of energies, a surfing of solar winds, on electro-magnetic wings, repelled by the particles that clash as the core radiates. I am a butterfly. A butterfly of winter, a butterfly of deep-encrusted streams, of rivulets of ice that gather at the edges of myself. I collect them. I melt them. I re-freeze them. I survey them.

And then I write them. And then I run them down your neck.