flying away
Sometimes you stop me flying away.
You recognise the signs. Normally I’m calm, cogent, clever. I look you in the eye and there’s a smile in my body language, if not on my face.
When it happens, you listen to me and help me. I think back to one time: I was trying to articulate how the world feels wrong, how nothing builds to anything, how loneliness feels like a Ponzi scheme built into us by an unkind designer. I spoke of shame, of fear, weakness and loss. Any keenness my brain might possess was lost in the murk of technical language expressing a garbled mind that did not understand itself. Any humour I showed self-reflected like a fun-house mirror, becoming a weapon to attack my own moorings.
On this occasion, I was pacing in your living room. You stood from the couch and gripped my chin in your hand, forced me to look at you. I remember clearly at the time you were starved, for reasons I didn’t and still don’t understand. Though a slip of a girl four inches shorter than me your eyes bore into mine and I wondered if this was it for me.
Instead you told me: “Andrew, breathe. Sit down, wait for me. You can be calm and still until I’m back, right?”
I nodded and I sat and I breathed; but I only managed calm for ten minutes.
He had already stopped moving by the time you got home. I stood when you strode through the door, struggling slightly with the ungainly weight. You walked past me and sat heavily on the couch. Your coat was unbuttoned, your legs wide apart in a confident, dominant gesture, and to let the shape of the body ballooning out your stomach sit comfortably on your lap.
You were so thin I could practically see his vertibrae under the white of your top. “Who was it?” I asked, now focused.
“Unlucky cyclist,” was all the description he ever warranted. “Help me out of all this.”
I peeled your coat off and was about to do the same for your top when you clapped your hand over mine. It being cold out and your fat reserves depleted your hands were freezing. Staring into my eyes with that same hypnotic intensity you showed me to move more slowly, take in the sensations, the moment-by-moment. You said, “Really be here with me,” and I was.
I didn’t fly away that day. You grounded me and gave my mind chance to patch up what had failed. I still recall every fold of the fabric of your strappy top, turned into a crop-top where it had rolled back from your belly. Your jeans were a nightmare to remove—always are, you like them tight and these were weighed down by two people—but the sound of the denim on the fabric of the couch and the scent of your skin as it, freed, fragranced the air, placed me squarely in that room.
You released a long breath when I removed your bra. The band had imprinted into your skin when the cyclist had temporarily swelled the diameter of your chest. Comfortable granny pants followed—seductive creatures of the night can be casual too—then socks, which made me smile because you don’t like people playing with your feet and by this point I was healthy enough to tease you with a stroke to your soles. You kicked away my hands and I laughed.
And then the room faded away. You sat naked on your couch, a meal passed out or passed away in your middle. Nothing else could occupy our minds.
I stroked from the bony prominences of your hips in towards the pendulous summit of your belly, feeling the hidden hips of your prey as I went. The motion aided your natural digestion; an active force massaging the pool of digestive fluids onto and around your prey. I followed the curve of your belly up to your then-small breasts perched upon it, eliciting a massive staccato belch as the lining clung even more tightly to its contents: ~brAAAAAaaaap~
You kept me with you in that room, fixed on adoration of the huge mound of flesh that was your gut. As digestion progressed all three of us changed: the cyclist softened, blistered and poured into the growing pool in your growling guts. You grew warm and fuzzy with digestion sleepiness, breathing and occasionally burping contentedly. And I was healed enough to take charge, laying you down and altering my approach.
As your belly softened I focused on collapsing the ruins of your meal’s body, pressing ribs till they popped loose from sternum, wiggling hips till the pelvic girdle collapsed, all so the relentless grind of your stomach could process him more completely. The burps, braaaps and bworps of this rapid digestion came smooth and regular, and were soon echoed by gurgling from deeper in your system as liquified human bloated the secret yards of your internal plumbing.
So I, with my mind of sky and air, did not fly away. Thanks to you I stayed grounded for weeks, my mind focused on what was important to me.
I hope you know how grateful I am.