PILLOW THOUGHTS

a black hole (but gentle)

There is a certain weight to the air tonight, and it puts you in a specific kind of mood — weary, philosophical, musing. A tiny shred of longing throbs within the yawning cage of your ribs.

You feel yourself slipping into reminiscence, a slippery slope that you do not try to dig your heels into tonight. You feel different, but when you look at your palms under the flickering light, the creases are the same. The person behind the dirty glass of the mirror in the public bathroom you’re in looks the same, looks like you.

(Here’s a little secret: the difference is within, where change often begins. Change; growth — in the moment that they are planted, and even as they first sprout, they are similar enough to be the same. But as time passes, it will become clear that they are very much not. Because you see, growth is change, but change is not always growth. It’s all a matter of perception, much like magic tricks are but well-placed mirrors.)

Time falls like moonlight — around you, over you, on you — as you pass under the neon signs like a phantom; a figment from a dream in a dream of your own. Between a bar and a club, right before an old abandoned shrine, you step in a particularly large puddle from the earlier rain. The faded red shrine is so out of place you feel as though you’ve stumbled through a rip in the fabric of time and space. Realities overlap, and time carves currents around you as tangible braided cords. So this is musubi, you think. So this is the interconnection between the universe(s). For a split second that stretches as long as forever, you catch a glimpse of an otoroshi, sprawled along the top of the torii gate. Its eyes blow open, red irises swimming in yellow sclera — and it sees you, knows you, opens you in a bloody mess of flesh and bone and flays you with its gaze. You’re falling: you see the ground rushing to meet you superimposed over the sea of clouds beneath your being. Wind and static alike burns in your ears —

— Then you take another step, and the moment shatters like raindrops on pavements. You leave the strange liminal space behind. Your heart patters on as is normal, but something deeper within your chest pounds and throbs like a fish out of water.

(Here’s something else for you to chew on: a fish out of water, a fish on land; these are examples of things that at first glance appear to be the same but are in fact very different, depending on perception.)

On the train, shoulder to shoulder and back to back with strangers, you find a heartbeat in the subway hum. You watch from above, removed, as the vessel that is your body bends down to scoop it up from between sneakers and polished boots with cupped hands. Reverent. You press it into your chest and imagine a black hole (but gentle), and feel it take root in your heart. As your hand molds itself around the rolling hills and valleys of the handle overhead, you memorize the rhythm and rattle of the train’s wheels on tracks till your heart learns to follow.

(Bloom is promise where decay is prophecy; future bleeds into flesh. Your hands tremble with remembered forgotten holiness as your eyes open in fractions and fractions still.)

• • •

sUrpRIsE i actually updated this earlier than i expected ajbdjsbf

i camped out at a cafe with a friend to rush homework today so yeet smh i finished editng the entire portfolio

you can read this alone or take it as a continuation of the previous work! i actually wrote this piece before of decay and bloom (and which comes last)

this is the last piece in my school portfolio (i chose to do a theme on growth) and of decay and bloom (and what comes last) was the first! it's supposed to depict the process of growth,, might post the others if i have confidence in them haha they kinda suck