snailwoman goes dumpster diving (wip)

Sunrise in Love

My name is Mari and I am the happiest woman in the whole world. I lay beside the love of my life, Migi, and our precious cat Snow Eyes. All together, our hearts are triangulated by love, warmth and contentment awash in so many soapy bubbles trembling with rainbow colors just to Pop!, infinitely snuggly and warm, the stuff of dreams!! Just try to envision a more wonderful life. I cannot. And all the time I spend consciously, I spend either outrageously happy, or I spend worrying over the terrible fact that this happiness could be temporary. 

Mari and Migi, Mari and Migi. I try not to think about the blunt fact that I’d end my own life if he were to leave me. He told me at the beginning of our relationship that he would never be the one to end things; I would have to break up with him if it wasn't ‘to be.’ Regardless of this promise, I can never get close enough to him, or be held tightly enough by him. I can never be loved enough, because I love him more than everything or anything I could ever love. I would rather be strangled to death than abandoned by a man like him.

And now today I am walking outside by myself, just to grab a coffee before having dinner with the loves of my thusly short life. 

Beginning of the End

The concrete folds around my foot like saltine crackers in tomato soup, disintegrating in large soft chunks until there is enough empty space for me to fall forward completely. I feel like I’m doing an underwater tumble-spin, and then I am upright, standing atop what appears to be the same solid ground. The clear blue sky appears to be the same blue, and all the details—leaves of dust-green weeds, cookie-crumble debris, mailboxes and concrete- remain consistent to the place I saw before I tumbled.

I open my front door, face-to-face with a wall of black rubber and woven texture. It looks like the backside of Migi’s shoe. 

He towers over me, picks me up by the scruff of my shirt collar, and says gently yet firmly:

“I’m breaking up with you.”

Instantaneous shock, my blood replaced with acid. A million tiny explosions. Screams like a mother whose child turned blue. My eyes must’ve fallen out of my head and new ones popped up like impossibly efficient blooms, because they see the world so differently than before he said those words. Colors, sounds, time, my sense of reality snaps and shifts. 

My eyes, which are really still in my head, see things my brain can only recognize and not believe. They see his tongue fall out of his mouth, impossibly long- a giant paper receipt, covered in text that I read without thinking, like a voice in my head. 

I’m breaking up with you. I know this isn’t a good time, but there just isn’t a good time, and I respect your time and my own time too much to draw this out any longer.

[write the rest of this when you are ready.]

He flips the silver garbage can open and holds me hanging like a ragdoll above the trash. It doesn’t look like the potpourri of waste I remember, but a deep, dark, endless void yawning with malice. 

Then I am corkscrew diving into the black, dissolving into light—I am falling through a spiral of leaves and branches, giving way to a flurry of red. I see at least one million flying shrimp, pink little babies in a different kind of red sauce, twirling upwards around me like bloody snow in a storm.

As I fall, I am thinking: sometimes when I have the desire to drink alcohol, I am desiring to soften the world and my nerves. I feel this happening when I imbibe. It is like lengthening the string--thin as a nerve, and trembling--tethering my head to my shoulders, so I bobble and sway with the breeze. As I fall, I feel that someone has lengthened the string: my head is a kite, blown further and further into the sky. But the sky is screwy, so I spiral upwards as the rest of my body plummets, and the dissonance of that sensation takes the breath out of my lungs.

The Dump

The ground feels like so many layers of rotting leaves beneath my feet… late autumn carpeting. Around me: piles and piles and piles of garbage as tall as skyscrapers; a horizon of motley structures separated by streets strewn with tiny gadgets, giblets and assorted doo-dads. Like a city of sandcastles made of odds-and-ends. The odor is sickly sweet yet icy, like powdered sugar and frost. 

Crying feels like relief and defeat, such as removing an arrow from your flesh releases pressure and blood all the same. It hurts terribly but it must be done, and we cannot stop it. Whoever rips these arrows from my body does so ruthlessly, and lets me bleed out impossible quantities of blood. I’ve always had infinite blood to bleed. Infinite tears to cry. This kind of pain knows no limits. It’s impossible to grab onto, like I can grab onto other kinds of pain and hold on until my limits are reached: when I vomit and my stomach twists in knots and I can’t breathe!; when my wrists once erupted into bubbling burns from a stupid baking incident; when I jumped into a hole in the ice last winter and felt my skin scream in the winter air--that is pain that I can hold onto like the horns of a bull. I can clench my teeth and white-knuckle those horns like a fucking cowboy. I know it will end, or it will destroy my body, such that the pain must end with the destruction of my body. The bull and I dance at the edge of oblivion, and he will (mercifully) buck me off and over the edge when my body inevitably falters. The pain of clinging on becomes physically impossible to sustain--and my brain, theoretically, dissolves into numbness. Slowly but surely I will always meet the end of that kind of pain, I believe.

The pain that makes me cry now has no horns. There is no merciful oblivion to my left or right. Instead, I am like an immortal fish submerged in boiling water: constantly tempted to jump out and into certain death, knowing I would be dying by choice. And there is a difference--between inevitable death and chosen death. 

I’m also transparent. That’s the first thing I notice--my body is, apparently, made of a strange material with the appearance of frosted glass and a jelly-like texture. My insides glow pink-ish behind the semi opaque flesh. What used to be my soft black hair now feels heavy and looks dark faded gray, like globs of molten pencil lead. My neck already hurts from keeping my head upright, but there is also strain on my shoulder blades running down to my hips--coming from what feels like the heaviest backpack I’ve ever carried, a gigantic object I am assuming is my shell. I twist my hands backwards to stroke at the shell’s surface--it feels smooth and solid, with many tiny ridges and facets in a whimsical design inlaid with silvery dust. 

Distracted momentarily by the beauty of my shell’s design, my next in-breath grounds me to this new, nightmarish reality once again. I think, I could have been a smear of gore on his fingertip. I could have been a splattershot of flesh on the ground. All it would have taken is one pinch, a bite maybe at his thumb skin, or I could have tootsie rolled down and over the edge. That’s how it feels anyway, with him gone, in another world (the one he tossed me out of). Spin spin spin until the ground gives out and gravity delivers me inevitably to disarray. And if I’m too scared to be crushed or to fall, it might be preferable to slice my skin open and bleed for no particular reason. I wonder if the blood would still be red and warm, or if it would ooze like pink syrup from the slit in my gelatin-body. 

How does a person survive this? How does someone live like this? I am alone in this dump, until I hear: 

“People do. People live on.”

TO BE CONTINUED! (maybe)