Blind – Lily Bix Daw

October 16, 2024

It’s gotten darker and the light outside the cabin window begins flickering on the tip of the wing. 
        I know what we are out here, up here. Down there
        I get drunk on the plane. monolith
        From above the clouds, they seem like a new and cavernous alien terrain. 
        I thought about the phrasing, “from up here” but decided it felt too personal and familial. 
        I watch the glowing horizon and imagine standing near it, emanating heat like a volcanic fissure. 
        We descend and it feels not unlike being on the top deck of a double decker bus, specifically, that time three and a half years ago. It would likely only feel this way to me, because it’s something about this moment that is making me cry. 
        The cloud forms tower at eye level, I imagine peering into a window and seeing a silhouette doing something private, backlit by orange light. Then the sun passes below the horizon and the clouds are made out in a pale dark blue tint of fading light. They retain shadow for a moment and are visible. I’m having the universal experience of recognizing that this is the last time they will exist to me. 

Everything’s the color of stone angels and cement statues.
        When I exit the plane, everyone has turned the color of a gargoyle in a video game I’ve never played before. 
        The sun is setting with a kind of passive heroism. the water below a wide, flat pool of molten steel. and a small dog wearing a plastic cone wobbles into view like a puppet on a stick. being waved over a suggested line of horizon. The dog traces itself into the sun and the sun does it back. The cone and its dog vibrate little black outlines and the bats in the sky pulse. Things are condensing before me, everything is pretending to be something else but it is all real. 
        When we lie face to face, when I wonder if I’m being honest lying on top of you-that’s not a thought I even want to acknowledge having, for however a fleeting moment. Your body is brass-like until reaching the part of your hand that segments into digits, then it looks debrided, or like a piece of felt was pressed into wet clay. Outside the window I stare into the water and envision bodies moving in the rapids, talking in hushed tones about somebody’s death. They are experiencing a return to lucid revelry now, and you call from across the room. Is there any way I can get this process moving a little faster? Because it’s not nearly as good as I thought it would be.
        My mother used to hold me close, keep my head pressed to her throat and chest, and I’d listen to the vibrations of her vocal cords reverberate as she spoke to other adults in the room. 
        I would shut my eyes tight and see a vast horizon, same old sun, and a small object moving hypnotically.  I’d listen to my heartbeat become indistinguishable from hers- this was my first encounter with the ground/sky phenomenon. 

I knew only when it was too late that the only thing to do was to go- somewhere familiar,  beside the bed- for a moment or for my lifetime. Between us there was always a flickering motion, like the minnows of rainwater on a windshield. Comfort is almost jumping from the branch to be with you and proves to be an extender of some sorts. You made a second self which knew many things and didn’t tell us. It shakily extended itself like a trembling leaf to offer the shelter it could provide to someone in the unsafety of this world.  And the protection is visible to me in warped shards. I see them in the blank sky, and in the shimmering of air above a flame. Some flowers will always smell the same as ever, someone will always spill the contents of a bucket, and mud will always join the blood of my knee. The water from that backyard hose will always taste metallic, will always seep into the hot ground and mix with the shit, and the people eventually will go on into it too, one by one- like topiary.

And then suddenly I was waiting in an underground waiting room 
        Of a hair salon on Main Street 
        Feeling extremely safe 
        Things are changing I’m moving I’m moving and changing I am going back to bed and I’m returning and I’m leaving and I’m coming back to myself into the same place the same places I’ve been in the same places that I haven’t gone but I will go and I’ll be at them sometime in the future and beyond and then they’ll become my past

We prioritized differently in relation to politics money or faith and we were brave enough to expose this.
        I have made it through an insurrection and have done everything I could to make things better.
        I imagine myself as the original singers must have been, standing in the middle of rows of corn: the enslaver’s world.

You have no esophagus. You have a gaper throat, you had your esophagus removed.
        Causing a loss of time, a restructuring of the temporal playing field, the reason why you exit a theater feeling disoriented.
        A man just emerged from the wall and he was the same colors as it.

The nights we spent watching things from the windows. Watching and waiting and not seeing what was behind the glass
        You’ll never understand 
        You’ll never really understand 
        It’s really good that you will