The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

After all, wasn’t cavity just another word for vessel?

She had no wish to transform trauma to performance,

It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.

She didn’t mean to be so cruel, but what else was she to do with the violence inside of her?

Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?

“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another.

The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.

It was a cage, but also a protective cocoon.

Is this my curse? To be unfathomable?

if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point?

Nothingness was a fate worse than pain.

At least with pain there was life, a chance at change and redemption.

Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.

“You don’t have to live with this pain alone.

The living put their own mark on the dead.

I misinterpreted.” “It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the History,”

This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.