My mother was pulled into a cloud and eaten, digested by its acidic composition. She was pregnant with me, and her milky proteins balanced the cloud’s toxic temperament.
Fetus in stow, the cloud drifted up into the atmosphere.
I ate, mother milk and cloud.
Droplets that were once her eyes became my food, and so, became my eyes. From her lungs I was nourished and breathed of my own. From her stomach, I felt full.
The cloud didn’t feel guilty about eating her. To this day, it weighs me down.
Beyond the cloud I saw atmosphere and other clouds. Below, the ocean. Above, distant constellations. Milky globulins floated about me. All that I knew was fluid, in essence.
I only left because a meteor knocked me loose. As I fell, I saw the cloud’s shape for the first and only time. Without the pressure I caused, it dispersed. The heavy molecules of my mother dropped, raining down as I fell to the earth.
This is why I’m breaking up with you. You have no interest in holding on to me.
I was there, you know.
When you cheated, fog filled the window. You looked through me. I’m no fetish-voyeur, still I wanted to see you satisfied without me.
A stranger’s hands wrapped around your neck. You studied your own glassy reflection. The expression was the same as always — numb to everything but self-dissection. I watched you watching yourself.
As the air became heavy I drifted away.
A TV show glowed, flickering in unison among the other apartments. Tenants discussed theories about the killed and the killers.
I floated up to a dark room on the top floor. Inside, a figure pressed a pillow between spread legs. In swift, violent movements they beat and smothered the pillow — a stand-in for the head of a lover. The pillow folded between trembling thighs, and was soon tossed across the hall.
I waited at the entrance of the building. Is it worse to lie or loom?
When the silhouette from the top floor exited the building before you, I took the excuse to follow and to avoid our inevitable confrontation.
I examined their movements from an objective distance. To the corner store for beer, discretely smelling fingers walking through the park, stopping at the pretzel stand, eating and drinking in the baseball field bleachers, watching teenagers bicker over the correct quotation of a TV show.
Humidity rose with the shifting heat. Though I resisted, I couldn’t help but fall asleep. A dream swept across the screen of my thoughts — you were a skyscraper filled with lovers.
Heat gave way to an afternoon shower.
A police officer woke me on the pitcher’s mound. I swear I’m not drunk.
The cop left, the bleachers were empty, I thought I heard teenagers laughing at me, but they were nowhere in sight. Back at the apartment building, I found only empty rooms. On the top floor, the pillow was still in the hallway. Face down.
The emptiness was oppressive. It’s why I avoided confronting you for so long. When you finally admitted your betrayal, you feared I would leave you. Only then did I consider leaving you.
Before we became toxic, I tried to be everything for you. The water in your tap, the moisture on your skin, the bath you took each afternoon.
I want to stay like this forever, we said. The air between us never moved again. Brackish comfort turned to stagnant tension.
We couldn’t move for fear of disrupting the other. A single dirty dish caused an hour-long argument. An unanswered phone call caused a panic attack.
I followed you on your commute. You read an article over a passenger’s shoulder. The article summarized an episode of a popular TV show.
I turned my back to you. If you loved me, you would always be looking for me. If a cold shiver passed through me, I would known you saw me. I felt nothing.
When I turned around, you were gone.
At the next stop, a derelict rushed to transfer dozens of plastic bags filled with other plastic bags into the cart before the doors closed.
Passengers rushed to assist. I stepped onto the platform, handing bags of bags to the people inside.
Thank you, bless you all. The gratitude was disingenuous, as the daily task relied on the reluctant chivalry of strangers.
I felt somehow that a dark truth resided beneath the vagrant’s milky eyes — microscopic worms filling the inner cone, mites mating along each eyelash, bacteria building a thick film over the lenses.
As the final bag was added to the heap, a digital chime rang out announcing the closing doors. The derelict stepped toward the train.
I tugged the neck of their sweater and pinned them to a steel pillar.
The doors closed and the train slid from the station. The bags, puffed and bulbous, drifted away. The elderly vagabond cried out over the loss of the plastic bags of plastic bags.
The train rumbled over the bridge, sketching an approximation of the horizon behind the buildings. I simply walked away.
There’s nothing to be learned from this. I suppose the pressure was getting to me.
I saw you on the roof of our apartment kissing that same stranger. It was raining and your clothes clung to your form. You paired your bodies. I loomed above.
You must have known I was watching.
People are so fragile. In a squall, I yelled, No.
Gush, rush, gust. Wail, whimper, flush. Air kicked at your chests. Water filled your lungs. A rush of wind pulled you and the stranger apart.
They disappeared from the ledge.
Once again, we were alone together. I floated away, fearing that staying would only consume you. The atmosphere between us layered clear on clear until you were too distant to find.
