Thrum

by Meg Smitherman

I find no comfort in my reflection. She’s a stranger to me.

I drift slowly up as the air leaves this liminal space, this breath before I give myself up to the vastness of space and God,

I’m drifting half out of the ship, half in, but even then it feels as if the infinite universe is reaching for me with inexorable fingers, with hands made of whorls of starlight, of depthless lightless chasms that hum like monsters of the cosmos. The air in my lungs feels like a dare. I’m challenging the firmament in its horrible power, and it is gazing right back at me, unimpressed.

Our knowledge is so minute, a tiny droplet in a vast sea that never ends, and we had the audacity to think we knew what we were getting into.

Some unknowable being, drifting darkly through the stars?

There is no other word for him. Handsome isn’t enough, and somehow it’s almost too tame a brush with which to paint him. He’s beautiful but twisted, a human made with the painstaking strokes of an artist who’s never seen one before:

a man who is not a man seeing into my soul, my organs, seeing and seeing until I am torn apart, atom by atom.

I’m both adrift and trapped like a rabbit by a fox. And he is the fox, shadowed in dusk.

In my head, I’m back home, and no one is dead, and I’m as close to happy as I ever got,

I want to know more. I want him to lay himself bare to me. I want to chart his nervous system, count his lungfuls of air, unfurl his DNA one strand at a time.

the push and pull of fright and curiosity, of want and sharp-edged grief, threatens to wrench me apart on a molecular level.

I have held men like this before and then fled. I’ve stayed, too. But were they different men, or was it always Dorian?

I hate that he’s still beautiful to me, that he’s so familiar.

But maybe I’m only cut out for pain.