Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

It was the way he just threw his body away. How he’d carve up his torso and arms with a box cutter, or go days without sleep, replacing whole meals with pills and cigarettes. Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young.

what an opener!

Silence. A fart.

he liked you—if he saw you as an ally, even temporarily—he’d make you feel like the center of his universe. And you’d believe it, at least for a while.

Everybody’s more complicated than a dog could be. Sometimes I think I liked Lu for the same reason.

To be 17 again...

Below, the lights looked like jellyfish and fireflies, and just then I decided I wanted to be buried at sea.

That was one reason I followed the Forum—to see all the examples of brave individuals radically altering their state of being.

how sure can we be of our own autonomy?

Like meeting God finally and learning he hates you.

Who hasn't thought this? Especially as a shitty teen?

He told me the planet had nerve endings. Sprawling out toward stars they’d never touch. He told me that when he breathed, the Earth felt it, and when the Earth breathed sometimes he could feel it too. He told me he wished his mother had miscarried.

Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.

I keep stomping but it won’t die.

The serpents sleep beneath a pile of dogs with golden hair.

“You’ve seen the way God sees. And God’s hurting people all the time.”

“It’s easy to be shitty when someone loves you unconditionally.

painting my wish on the oxygen.

And I left knowing it would ruin him. For decades I’ve told myself I had no other choice, but now I know that probably isn’t true. Sometimes I tell myself I was only a child then, but usually I know that’s also a lie.

By the time we were twelve years old we’d already shared a lifetime together. Hand in hand, colonizing the town’s hidden spaces. Building new realities with only our shared imaginations and veils pulled over the mundane.

We learned each other’s internal lives. Became scholars of them.

Even now, I won’t repeat what he told me.

The world, and my life inside it, shifted ever further toward him. A new veil thrown over everything I once assumed was true.

The way his face bloated into a mocking pout; aging him forward into a hideous future he’d never live to see.

He never wanted to be buried—he wanted me to throw him in the river. The only way he’d finally be able to sleep and be forgotten. None of this was for him.

I changed so slowly I didn’t even see it happening. Always dying becoming who I needed to be.

The polar bears went extinct. East Boston sunk beneath the ocean. The west coast burned to cinder. Thousands died in a tube shot through space, floating frozen and static forever. I’m still here. Here for some time.

I SEE YOU, it read.

We fucked each other with fresh-picked ears of corn.

I cried in the bathroom. Something crawled inside me that hadn’t been there before.

Occasionally we sang and rapped along to songs about codeine and girls with no love in them.

“It’s like someone dropped a bomb on here.” “It’s been like this. Probably just that you’ve been gone a while.” “I haven’t been gone that long.” “Three years is a long time.” “It hasn’t been three years.” He sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you man, but I think I know how to count.”

I told her I was so sorry, bringing her hand to my lips and kissing it until she stopped breathing and became only a body.

I hum through my broken throat.

The rags had a face. His face. He looked up at me, smiling.