The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

I thought of all the things I had avoided during my poet days at school and beyond, days of waking late and drinking early, wandering through life with my one constant a constant shrug: regular jobs and regular people and regular hours, all the commonplace pains and terrors that, by fleeing, I had somehow replaced with these others, this whole grotesquerie that was—yeah, c’mon, say it out loud, there’s no one here to hear you—driving me out of my mind. Driving me crazy.

Nakota hanging on me like the leech she was,

and the pain rose as I did, agony’s levitation, drawn completely upright in an arrow line with tears running not down but up my face, dripping into my hair

more; higher oh help me and still more to a point that, oh God, I had never imagined there could be so much pain in all the world, certainly not contained in the stupid simple vessel of my body, my body, and as I wondered why I was still alive my conscious eyes closed, taken by tunnel vision to a vanishing point, but though I couldn’t see I could still feel, oh my yes, oh my God, wouldn’t this ever stop? It didn’t. But I did.