Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: love

Routine Appointment

Once a week, every week, you head down to the tattoo parlour to get my name removed from your chest. The tattoo guy has long since stopped bothering to tell you that there’s nothing there. Those five letters are clearly still there, with the jet black of an industrial printing press, still smelling fresh. Your heart is nothing but scar tissue by now. You attempt to chat with the guy, but it rings false even in your tone-deaf ears. He suggests that if my name is still there in a week, you should consider writing something else over it instead.

Unlikely Places

In the bathroom mirror when it’s fogged up, so that I’ll see it only when I’m naked and cold and vulnerable.

In the bottom of the cereal box.

In the blood.

On the balloons I used for our daughter’s birthday, I got a letter from you every time I inflated one. Some of the taller parents had to crouch when they entered our home.

In the sky, with the clouds.

In the pattern of the blooming cherry tree you planted thirty years ago. How long have you been planning this?

You write little eloquent apologies in the most unlikely places.

Fragments of a Work in Progress

Thoughts stretched like shadows elongating; like you’re on a painstakingly slow-revolving ship made of glass heading outwards from your sun, awaywards, deepspacewards. Your thoughts (the shadows) are then everywhere because the sun is underneath you – and you ascend, unless your mammal mind has already adapted to the rotation.

Grahm found that difficult. Everything he believed in space was new; the cogging went in spirals inward. For a few amorphous months Grahm had gone through every holy book he had ever been taught about, and delved into the library for more. He used them up, quicker than he shed his skin and replaced himself (which for regular humans was the luxurious length of 7½ years).

When he had first been shot out into space there had been food with him, to trick him into thinking he had a supply. In fact, all those paperbags were one and the same bag, and when he opened the first one he collapsed them. Grahm, though advanced enough to eat the starlight shining in through all the windows, had requested this specific food to carry with them into the cold of space and now the bag had gone stale and the smell of Americana was faint enough that it could have been anything.

On a similar trajectory as he was his Chanceone, his choice one, Decarulin, who he was told was beautiful. He did not really care; they were going to fuck. That was the one thought that came back, though it too in different shapes. It was on the list. Some parts of him liked her, others hated her, but his whole being wanted her. That was sensor-proof.

Grahm started making up his own gods, but they lacked in weight and symbolism compared to the old gods and he used them up too quickly. He could spend a month in the intermediary state spoke of in the Bardo Thödol, or six weeks digesting [the footnotes of [the footnotes of [the footnotes of a typo]]] in the Torah scrolls but when worshipping the Eternal Lobster all he could do was shed and empty, all his skin cells aligning to attention. Days flew by, Grahm felt motion sickness from it – or was it the rotation? – and his pantheon thinned to just him, the devil, and the Alien.

“I am chock full of clockwork chemicals,” he said to space which did not reply, but rather looked scornfully back at him, malice in its million eyes. Looked back at them. He tried for a moment to repeat the declaration but started rhyming and embarrassed himself.

An Amicable Alternative to Divorce

I have redefined you to exclude the bits of you that I dislike. I know this sounds harsh, but it is the only way to save us. I figure fair is fair, so I have divided your stuff up, 70/30, so that you can keep at least a third of your stuff. It is okay because you will have me. I have sent the other parts of you home to your family. I paid for the plane ticket myself. They said they would pay me back but I know better by now, don’t I? That’s why I sent them away.

Aching for You to Eclose

You were a nervous kid in winter; not anymore. You have wrapped yourself in so many layers of protective silk that you can’t breathe. You won’t let me in, you won’t let anything out. You think your heart is a cocoon, but you failed biology quite catastrophically and one day your chest will hatch. A million moths will escape you and as long as their wings beat your blood will pump, sure, but the moths belong to everyone who was ever nice to you. Every time someone dies, your pulse will slow. And I am waiting for spring to come.

Heartbreak

The loudest sound ever recorded in human history was accompanied by the pitiful whimper of broken china and the soft, carressing hush of a slammed door; Philip Raeburn’s heart had been broken. There was one sharp pang that travelled with the wind until it was finally shouted down by the roaring ocean. An aeroplane or two were lost in the struggle. From the various reports of windows crashing in and the timestamps on broken recording devices we can calculate the precise moment, down to the microsecond, if so needed. Hearing never returned to normal after that, nothing else did either.

Overture

Orwell and Julia’s relationship had an overture at a Christmas party two years before they actually, truly, met.

Orwell and Julia’s relationship was a classical opera in three parts. Their marriage was a slow movement, their wedding and divorce both lightning fast.

Orwell and Julia did not know they had met before the night they met again, something Orwell was embarrassed over and Julia was traumatized by. They had both been too intoxicated to remember exactly.

It was obvious, how it would go. The friend who introduced them to one another said they had chemistry. What they had was music.

Ablach

Remember the last time you felt at home anywhere. Close your eyes if it helps. Lie down somewhere, relax, stop listening for the signs of the apocalypse. Let the blurry contours make their way through the haze of memory until they’re sharp, colourful. And remember with more than your sight, too. The scents and the ambient sounds and the sensation of a hand moving up and down your side, slowly, as if having all the time there is in the world to have. And remember the taste of the cooking, of the air, of everything.

You will be there again.

Shadows

And if you see me, pretend not to know me. I always watch where the sun throws my contours; worried, excited. If our shadows should ever overlap, it will rend the earth we stand on. They are the spiteful, angry shapes that outline us. We will suspect an earthquake – we are Californians, after all – but even the air will vibrate, even the invisible strings that connect our hearts. I will go far away, in my mind, and I hope we will never meet in well-lit rooms. Always cherish the darkness, love that which keeps us nebulous and hard to define.

Stearin

That boy always had a lighter on him.

They would always do it in his bedroom; never hers. Every time before he backed onto the bed and fell backwards, all tousled hair and coy grin, he would light the one thick white candle by the window like a sacred ritual. It would go out by itself when they lay there, spent and giggly and warm, and he called it theirs.

When it was a stump of just one inch she asked what he would do when it burnt down.

“I’d get a new one,” he said, with a sad smile.