How presumptuous – this love.
Waiting at the edge of my sanity.
Confident in its future.
Secure in the belief that it will sit so heavily on my chest,
forcing my fragmentation whole.
And then?
I will wade.
Limbs placid,
neck, head, torso
swaying lyrically into this new disposition,
inebriated by the sudden rush of respirating silence into insides
clogged with thick sap of melancholic thoughts.
Hardened into corporeal helplessness.
Into the quiet.
Into the stillness that lives
in the eyes of the other attuned to every tremble of my pupils.
He who lives for the upward slope of cheeks,
the narrowing of eyes,
the gapped smile that exhales a self
finally pacified by a benevolent boundedness,
an altruistic indenture to the love of another.
My fragments are all mixed up.
Time has calcified my capacity for subcutaneous giving and receiving.
And I no longer remember that feeling –
like still leaves at the bottom of my gut swept up in a sudden gust of wind, twirling and twirling upwards and upwards,
until they explode across the roof of my skull –
a constellation of sensations for my consciousness to stare at,
before sighing in relief at the slow dissipation of everything
but him and me and the harmonious heaving of our affections,
rocking us towards one another.
When it comes –
this brazen love,
it will find only fragments.
Glassy and impenetrable.
Nothing remains of the leaves.
Nothing is left to flutter across the dusty stage of my viscera.
And my body can no longer remember what you and I,
what we, could sow in fertile soul.
Sophie Chamas
Sophie Chamas is a Lebanese PhD student at the University of Oxford, where she focuses on the anthropological study of contemporary Lebanon. She is also a writer and has contributed to The State, The Outpost and Wherever Mag, amongst other publications. She was previously co-editor of the Middle East-focused online storytelling platform Mashallah News.
