Fire

Burned

III.

     There was no physical sensation present to date that could coat my veins with such a complex combination of dry ice and fervency I felt when I departed the hospital following my discharge. My thoughts were drenched with the reddened eyes of the grieving woman, the texture of her hair, the swoop of her neck. Muscles of my chest cavity tightened with anxiousness from the uncertainty her presence had imprinted. Feeling deluged and reduced, I was flung backwards into childhood psychosocial stages of autonomy verses doubt. She deprived me of my autonomy without consent, sifting by with rumination and arose doubt where I was restricted from exploring who she was. Coincidentally now overrun with primitive and instinctual compulsions, like the curious girl from puberty – but this wasn't a drive sensuous in nature, it was an insatiable need to satisfy myself with intimate knowledge. Knowledge of what existed beyond the unreadable expression she closed me out with. 

     What was clear was that she wasn't a very suggestive woman; conservative was something I knew. A photograph could tell tales, but only the physical could speak the truth when it came to understanding women. None of her features were in contradiction with each other, and maybe it was that which made her so sightly even hours after she had gone. The loud cries she flushed the hallway with were genuine; and that is how I read her so accurately.

     The next morning as I were wheeled out through the exit doors back into the outside world, the thoughts of her had consumed me. Her demeanor was externally insincere, and a gift when expressed so raw as the day before. The strength to burden others with my feelings is something I lack, and so did she. Part of this was human nature, but it was uniquely represented in every being, and so appositely in hers.

     I was a woman with a secret world, buried underneath talents and caricature. I hid with affectation. People had created who I was a long time ago, they had always assembled my character, envisioned me nude with their eyes – and subjectify me into their imaginations. They projected meaningfulness onto me, and because of that they did not allow me to create my own. The only release of emotion I could show through real agency was achieved in a loss of control, a traumatic event that sliced and violated without permission. A betrayal; a death.

      I breached an intimate moment for this woman in the hospital. In those few moments of observation, I could still only say more about myself, than I could about her. 

     Internally unsteady; my chest continued to constrict, and I shifted the seatbelt from between my breasts and placed it behind my back. Manually starting to breathe, my mechanical inhales relieved my brain of it's involuntarily duties, careful to not arise suspicion in Sara who settled next to me in the driver's seat as we left the hospital.

     And above all else, the woman had created skepticism. Maybe it was the idea I had trespassed over her privacy, or maybe it was the receptivity she gave to let me observe her mourn. The enriched culture of Italians take pride in body language. Our native tongue was bodies, and we spoke with movement. Bodily expression, and the physique by the way of art was an ingress into the heart of Italy, but the woman soon chose to make herself indecipherable when she realized I could read. She wasn't Italian, but she had a language to be learned. Mother would say,