NAUSEA

She presses her palm to the left side of her abdomen, and my flesh dissolves into her hand. Her left hip sinks beneath the pressure into the empty space behind her, and the string between her body and mine yanks my stomach out of my skin. No one notices. I quickly grab the pounding organ and shove it into its proper hiding place. As a child, I would hide my feelings underneath my blankets. Sometimes my feelings would lock sleep out of my bedroom, so I would drag my sleeping bag into my parents’ bedroom. I would place it on the floor, tuck myself inside, and hide. My parents would awaken to a bedroom full of 6-year-old emotions, but before they had a chance to decode them, I would snatch them all, stuff them into my mouth, swallow them, and sneak back into my sleeping bag. Out of sight, out of mind; what you don’t know can’t hurt you; and other such clichés. Unfortunately, too many secrets before bedtime can cause indigestion, and they don’t make Tums strong enough for that kind of acid reflux.

Her body twists in and out of the absolute potential surrounding her, and I watch as she deconstructs the 4th, 5th, and 6th dimensions until I have melted into her and the floor and the mirrors and the music and her movement and myself. I am the river, and she is the current. I am the rock, and she is the water. I am the möbius strip, and she is the enigmatic boundary connecting me to the universe. But I think it’s time to get back into that sleeping bag and consume consume consume until my stomach rejects everything and my flesh becomes slave to the porcelain altar once again.

I watch her watch herself in the mirror behind me as I sit with my legs crossed. her eyes lift up and down, scanning the fluid motion of her ethereal body in a futile attempt to burn a carbon copy into her retina. But she forgets her movements a second after her body performs them. A millisecond. A nanosecond. A fraction of a second smaller than the human eye can see, hear, or taste. So I devour her insipid body, and it dances down my throat, down my esophagus, and into my stomach, where the butterfly wings flap back and forth around her flailing arms and legs and torso. I look down and lift my shirt. My stomach has turned red, bright red, blood red. No one notices. She keeps dancing, but I can no longer see anything but my bleeding torso. I have finally internalized her entire body, and my own red flesh stretches and pulls as her legs kick every which way from within. My stomach continues to stretch and grow until it feels larger than a woman pregnant with quintuplets, and I can finally see where the red is coming from. The stretch marks on my abdomen have opened, and I can see inside myself. No, not the metaphorical self; blood, intestines, tarred lungs, and my last pay check (I swallowed it for a bet one time, long story). I see myself looking up at me, and I fall into the stretch mark, down my skeleton, past my organs, and onto the grass, looking up at myself.