Dysphoria

Where Light and Darkness Meet

I know I live like I am made of smoke
Slipping through fingertips and limbs and skin
Such an intangible being with
a dangerous effect
And I am sometimes struck by the peculiar feeling of
Space
A great body, an orbiting planet slowly spinning
Around
Waiting for a massive collision
And hoping the debris will stay close
Stuck in orbit
But I think if you were to reach out and touch me
With shaking fingertips
That perhaps I would feel I were made of glass
Instead
And I would crack where your skin touches mine
But when you breach that hollow space between us
I feel galaxies bursting underneath your touch
Nuclear and instantaneous
Novas sparking with violent light
And it feels like dying

I want to surrender
But stars weren't meant to die
So soon
I think they were made to
Expand over millennia into slow and chaotic
Death
So I cling to the edge of cosmic ending
And it reminds me of theory in action,
That proclamation of
I know this to be true,
So loud even the void
would carry it

And I am so tired of existing in the
Space in between
Who I am and who I want to be
Or who you think I am and
Who I really am
I want to show you my surface
Underneath the atmosphere of my skin
And teeth
And alien shape
Expose you to this new land,
I am reminded of unfamiliar worlds
I dreamt of as a child
Before reaching upward toward starlit
Sky
And breaching the boundary where
Light and darkness meet,
I feel the immeasurable distance between
these things
these unknowable masses that
riddle the heaven-painted sphere
Like a physical touch
And I am so fearful that it cannot be
crossed
But when you speak, the syllables on your
tongue
Sound so much like
Discovery

Now I think of the way all things
Are created
With twisting gas and
unbearable
unrelenting
heat

And time

I know I live like I do not know time
That time and I have never met
And it has not already
robbed me
Or touched my lips and eyes
And birthed something
Uncontrollable
Inside me
But I think if you were to look at me
I'd see that passage of moments
And days and nights
Inside your body
Rotating far too readily
And I would be
Terrified

Because I think we live too quickly

I sense the parts of my body expanding
And spinning
Around
Accreting into something
Sure
But this is just the beginning
That aching point when solar systems
Are pulled into being
And form drawn out
and
Mysterious things
I do not want to be a mystery to my own soul
So I live like I am made of smoke
A gaseous nebula before
Heavy elements
Sink me into sudden and solid and
absolute existing,
Or
before my core collapses into an inescapable
black hole
And I eat the stars around me
without mercy,
(I can think of better fates)