The Warm Spandex of Wonder
Before picking your words like peanuts between chopsticks because you worry
that you can never clear the fog, crack the shell that has immured your mind,
your words interned within a ribcage of twine. Before you ever needed to hand
a shrink your peanuts because they were the offspring of your heart’s kiln and
before there could be a dying fire, vacillating fire, convolving fire, a vortex, no fire,
held in the cells of your seeds and laid bare by suave attentive shoveling. Deft,
snoopy, unnerving. An inculcated effortlessness in your therapist’s facility, their
muscles of facial expression loyal to the truth of their mechanical motility. Call it
operant conditioning, muscle memory. Call them skilled. Call when you need them.
Before burning life into your nerves void of sensitivity. Before breaking your own
heart to feel something. Before the steps of fibrous tissue on your arms weaved a path
that kissed the first gates of heaven, remembered the metallic tango of blade and blood,
remember the transcendence of your mother’s scream into ultrasonic inaudibility
as you watched her and your soul stretched out to her from an elastic leash bound
around your brainstem and produced through your eye socket. Before you blacked out
even. Before your dark-cloud age. And before you started looking in on the outside
Before you learned to lie that you fell and be believed. Before all these, there was a boy
who loved the stars, unbothered, crooned uncalculated songs and delved into the world
with a transparent polythene bag of wonder hugging his eyes like spandex. He was warm.
the half-life of a fast-acting love potion
you fell in love with a boy
who came alive only at night
too much of your pills
& the receptors amass
disdain for your panacea,
temporary
the only constant thing
that is not to say // too much
wouldn’t kill you // would kill you
wouldn’t kill you // you really don’t know
how to love the same
person // everyday
too much // would kill you // wouldn’t kill you
your boy put all of his love in a bottle
& only sees you when he drinks
& his eyes—
he // & you withdraw // to repress
your tolerance to love
you fell in love with the boy
who only came online at night
Joshua Morley, 18, is a Nigerian writer, artist, and undergrad student at the University of Ibadan whose works explore mental illness, identity and queerness. When not observing the motions of things with personal abilities of clairvoyance, Morley can be found making music or visual art. Or sleeping.
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