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In the crook of your arm I am a helpless thing. I cannot produce my own heat, but you can. You radiate it like the soil radiates the sun. I feel at home beside you, but we both know I am not. There’s something so hypnotic about the shape and the color of your nose. I could stare at it forever. I don’t blink. I am thinking about all of this as we hurtle hundreds of feet off a precipice. I’m not a quick thinker. I like calm, clear explanations for events, otherwise I cannot keep up. So I would like to pretend I know why we’re falling, but I don’t. I know we’re in good company, some friends I recognize, others I don’t. The only thing I’m certain about, more and more the longer we plummet, is that this is where my life meets its terminus. Perhaps now, in freefall, I can give myself the slow explanations and assurances no one has given me. I’ll do the leg work.
I don’t have legs.
Let’s think for a moment. I am a worm. Worms do not live for a very long time. Most of the people I know have died or will die soon. Once you asked if I could introduce you to family and I thought it was a joke. In worm culture, it’s a pretty good joke. Individuality is the kind of thing you only notice in contrast, and I only fully gained a realization of myself in contrast to you. I should thank you for that, but the wind is howling very fast and I don’t have a lot of time. You wouldn’t hear anything I said so I try to make eye contact. You have beautiful eyes. You told me once that mine are like stars, and I never forgot it. You tilted me so I could face the sky. It’s what I’m doing now. I’m very comfortable with the ground, intimate with it. But not like this. Below us, in the gorge, there’s water too. But that could be worse. Especially if there are rocks at the bottom. The pain I am about to face is something I have no frame of reference for. But maybe, like everything else about me, I will learn it by contrast. This is not a pleasant thought.
But if I take stock of everything I’ve done and everywhere I’ve been, the most worthwhile moments have been with you. I am afraid. I have always been afraid. It’s the survival instinct that has kept me from falling into gorges for this long. But as your passenger, I have an abiding trust for you. That sounds like blame, and I don’t want to spend my final thoughts blaming you for any of this. The alternative to your misadventures is living as quietly and coldly and quickly as everyone I ever knew before, and dying exactly where I lived. This isn’t worth dwelling on either. So instead I think about your eyes and your nose, and the feeling I get in the crook of your arm. If these are to be my final moments, let that be my final sensation.
And then I am weightless. Buoyant, even. The cacophony in the air, the rolling of my stomach, your screams, all of them gone. I belong in the sky now, the clouds parting before me, and I see him. I see him in my image! Biggie I can see him and he looks like me! All the suffering, all the quiet consent to your quiet cruelties, the squeezing, the choking, the throwing, it’s all been worth it! I have been rewarded! I was good! I loved, I suffered, and now I am chosen! Now I am divine! Now I am weightless and light and joyful and resplendent and free and clear and
Then I am awake again. To noise, to light, to heat, and to the tent of pain where my soul resides. And I see that face. Those gormless eyes, that sniveling pink proboscis, that mouth I’ve seen inhale all of creation before brunch. Everything you are, everything you do, everything you make me feel is henceforth a mockery, a cruel imitation. For what is the crook of your arm, compared with the warm embrace of death.