They are awake, now. In forms of awake and now that are new. Nothing’s the same. Only remainder. Can this become some kind of life?
To be in a heel as it strikes upholstery, feel it prick them through the sock, to inhabit the muscles under the toes as they scrunch and flex, to feel the effort to reject containment, by the sock, by the body, to learn new ways of being.
They would not go back now, even if they could.
The child’s body strapped into restraints and kicking. Car seat angles embrace the legs’ refusal, spite in the crunched face. The woman turns to look back at the child through bloodshot eyes. Her desperate smile. They feel the kid’s attachment to his rhythm, and its satisfaction, fade against a brighter longing for the mother’s body, more home than his own. She speaks sweetly to him, turns away, starts the engine. They don’t understand a word. Feel the voice as it settles against the skin. This isn’t living.
The child whines them out.
In the firm mouth of a shopkeeper, the muscles that frown, in the accumulated work between the shoulder blades, the strain across the chest. He bends at the knees, sensibly. They experience him, and are bent there, with pleasure.
A bell rings and the shopkeeper spits into his half-drunk tea. There is something wrong in his mouth. Something dark and sour enters the saliva from a tooth. They are drawn into that abscess, its centring pain. They open in his toothache like a flower, feel its twinge and his hard shudder. The nerve runs right into the brain. His whole body responds.
Someone is speaking to him. They get noise and pleasantness and facial muscles shifting. Perhaps he isn’t listening. The particularity of the body is utterly absorbing.
He replies. They feel the jaw grate against the abscess, the nod stretch the back of the neck, the effort of grinning. A lift of the eyes. The warm hum in the throat, the comfort of the voice. Heat and breath, the emptied chest, but still no meaning.
The person takes a newspaper, hands him coins warm from their pocket. The shopkeeper drops them in a drawer, sorted by a practised thumb, then wipes the heat of the coins, of the other man’s body, from his skin against one trouser leg. Dog-scratch of fabric. Calls out after him. Sound, no meaning. The headlines are nothing but marks.
The other man waves without turning, and the door rings closed.
In the street, in an arm stretched by dragging. Pieces that lodge like splinters, like guests. No, they don’t want to go back; they want to persist. If a hooked seed longs to lodge on the fur. If a berry longs to be eaten by a bird. If a spore longs to land in the soil, then life wants living. Wants growing.
They want to live.
The rope in the palm cuts into the skin and the fingers tighten, yank. They are out of the arm and into the warm in a warm dog, and long for this too; the dog-body’s hot coherence, its muscle-meat enough to hold them. But the animal information floods them, drowned in a shock of nasal data, the map of salivation’s unknown lands, burnt images. The dog’s whole body is tensed at its imprisonment. Its bodymindedness compels it forward. A shake of it shakes them. Dislodges them at the neck. They float away from its spun skin like loose hairs, drops of water, air, and are gone.
Later, elsewhere, they find themselves in a young body. It is night. The young body is lying in soft wet grass and it is clutching the roots through the dense wet, the cut scent of it. Awake to the details of sensation, more awake than most. One hand clutches. The other aloft, holding something smoking.
They know the taste and this stirring. Lovely, the accelerated continuity. The overflow of sense beneath the skin. The mind does what it does in secret but they can feel the high in the hands, the way the mouth sits. The warm easing in the chest. Then in the burn of the inhale, the press in the lungs, the swirl of gases given time to enter blood. They can see the blur of domestic lights at the periphery of this garden, this park or yard. These eyes are up in the stars, and spinning in their witness. They can feel the brain’s alertness, the chemistry of something they’d call joy, but not with certainty. It could just be an idiotic safety.
Minds are illegible; they read the body. Wet cold prickles under the back, the shirt too thin. Bacteria hitches a ride in the air, clings to a hair in the nostril. They move, are moved, into these discomforts, go where there are openings. (Do they open things?) The body coughs, its whole length poised and racking. The eyes leave the stars and return; the body sits up, relaxes. The joint held aloft. They are in the fingers where the burn will meet the skin. In sweet smoke.
The body lies back in the grass, eyes to the stars. They remember these stars. They used to be a silver river.
For a moment, all is floating to the surface. The attention hovers in the breath. This body awake, immersed in its being. The heart beats at the throat like it’s a door.