Читать книгу Twice The Speed of Dark - Lulu Allison - Страница 17

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If I could only stay still.

Understanding shivers, glimpsed briefly between slanted, slippery planes, then slides away. Understanding skids, finding no purchase on memories so faintly grasped. Understandings are slender and slippery, fine satin ribbons that slide through my fingerless hands. Just as part of the story seems about to shimmer into place, I am let go again. Upside downside, inside outside – it is any way round in death.

Gravity has disowned me. I had not grasped what refuge she gave. I had not understood her subtle care. I have not been able to hold on as she let go. It takes enormous will to hold back the blackness when gravity is no longer your ally. She let go her embrace, and I am pulled away to tumble, inchoate, through the eternal dark.

Gravity is the child of older powers. Those ancient parents, they have relieved their daughter of her duty to care for me. She no longer intercedes to keep me whole, to hold me. They are my guardians now. I hurtle and shift in this new vastness, an expression of direction rather than form. I see the patterns I describe without understanding the design. Sometimes, in the shimmer and the shift, I start to see the patterns of my own longed-for story, threading through the ancient blackness of my new and prehistoric path.

If I am lucky I graze the Earth, with her soft cushion of sky. Gravity holds me briefly once more, her love not after all gone.

When I can hold onto the Earth for a little while, I am full of nostalgic longing to stretch out my feeling body, to match her surfaces with my own. The ground is still a memory even as I am close enough to lie on it. I miss my body. I miss the body of the Earth. The soft moisture of grass over the muddy squelch of winter. Or to lie in the sticks and leaves of summer woodland. To have the skin that would be marked by sticks and leaves, marked with gentle indents. The ground scratchy and dry above a layer of secret damp. The runnels of bark under a pressed palm. A cool slab of porcelain at my back, still warming in a newly run bath. I remember sensations, surface memories. I try to find the memories of mind, turn the threads into something that my fingerless hands, my imaginary hands, can hold. A story that my spooling soul can reel in and tell.

I see them, now and then, my loved ones. I see that they get older; it is the only mark I have of the passing of time. I see my family. And him. I see from the marking of time on them that I spent what must have been years in a chaotic, fragmented dream, glittering here and there in the dark. For years, a dark tumbling glimmer, fine soot dust down a chimney, or harsh shards of smashed smoked glass.

As I flounder in these timeless fields, I gather chaffs of memory, try to find in the slender harvest an understanding of why Ryan did what he did. What made him able? What made his harm? I can’t be sure I know why I died, but I want that story. I want to tell it. Why did he kill me ? Why did I let him? How did I come to let myself be orchestrated by him so fatally? How did I come to be killed in a way that would have seemed risible, impossible, were someone to predict it ? I was a girl who knew this right from that wrong, a girl who had a clear way forward s. I was not lacking in self-belief or self-determination. I was a girl who, laughing with my friend, could not believe the flip-flopping foolishness undertaken by others in the name, apparently, of love. Now I understand – there is another kind of strength in losing oneself . A different strength is required for that self-abandonment. But it is not a strength worth cultivating.

I became a girl who told lies to herself, learned them so deeply and secretly that it has taken the unrave l ling intrusion of the blackness to find them out. I don’t share blame for my death, no I don’t. But I became part of what let me die. He is the one who did that. Implicating me in my own death. That shame I put on him too.

I need to find the story, to find what brought me here. I think I have enough to start.

Twice The Speed of Dark

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