True Love in the Days of Black Holes [Short Story]

in #writing6 years ago

For years I trained alone in a small desert oasis, isolated from the rest of the world. I lived in a small thatch hut with a dirt floor, next to placid water. I’d brought nothing with me except a few pairs of clothes, a blanket, cooking utensils, and a little first-aid kit. During the day I burned and in the night I froze, but I had come out there to cure my sickness and train my mind until it became like a razor and I refused to leave until I accomplished my goal.

I had to boil the water from the oasis to keep from getting sick, and I lived on frogs, little fish, and the occasional coyote. Sometimes I’d find grasses and make a little soup. I grew thin from lack of food, and was often weak. I ran out of bandages and disinfectant soon enough, and had to fashion makeshift bandages from plant matter. The usual fast fashion was never intended for the rigors of the desert, so my clothes wore down into threads.
There was no Internet, and I had brought no books, only my journals to write in. But soon I ran out of space to write and I had only my mind to keep me occupied - so I was often bored. At first I’d speak to myself to try to keep myself entertained, to try to give a cognizant narrative to the things that were happening around me, but soon even the internal monologue slowed into a stolid, sludgy hum. Days passed where I did not speak even to myself, and I often felt like a reflection of the desert itself, burning and then frozen, revealing nothing but my own organic hum.
I’d been living in the city before then, working as a waitress. I didn’t really like the job, but I learned how to flirt, so I made fairly good tips. I never thought much about what I wanted to do with my life, so waitressing was as good as anything else. At the time I’d been trying to wrestle a black hole that’d been inside me since birth. Every day when I dressed for work I’d see in the mirror that the hole was widening, but I felt powerless to stop its course. So I’d look away from the mirror, go to work, return home like flies were buzzing all over my skin, and drink until I forgot about it, at least for a moment. Sometimes I’d even stop seeing the black hole, for minutes at a time.

It seemed to blossom in the night, fed on the rich soil of my nightmares.

I always woke up feeling disassembled, in a heavy panic, without really understanding why. I felt like I was falling into the black hole, falling into the core of me, and I would have slipped away in mere minutes if I’d not awoken in time.

I’d met a man who came in every day for coffee, a man with skin like leather and eyes that’d. I called him sweetheart even though I’m sure there was nothing sweet about him. We began to speak. He told me he was raised on a farm in Kentucky, and I imagined him putting out a lame horse without hesitation. I imagined him digging graves for pets and the calluses never seemed to bother him. He didn’t strike me as a sociopath, not really, just soul-weathered, shredded at the core.

I didn’t see myself as a sociopath either. Bitter, and bad maybe, but I knew I still felt things even if most of it was shredded and devoured by the black hole.

He started ordering dessert with his coffee - a cherry pie or a tart, things that seemed too sweet for his taste, and oftentimes he hardly touched them. Later, when I was naked in his bed, and he was touching my breasts, my hips, he admitted he wanted an excuse to stay longer, to continue speaking to me. His fingers were rough and his tongue was rougher but I’d let him take me back home that night after my shift because I’d seen the black hole inside of him too. Because I had thought for a long time that I was special in my misery

I was not special. Not in that way.

And many nights after work our black holes danced, both magnetized and repulsed, unwrapped underneath our clothes. They stretched so wide that we lost our bodies inside of them, and some nights I didn’t know whether I was inside of my mind, or his. We talked about our dreams and our fears as we lay together. Sometimes he’d even take me out to dinner. But whenever I opened my mouth and tried to speak something real, it was the black hole who spoke for me.

The black hole said that I wanted to die in the middle of a blizzard. The black hole said I’d never known true love, and never would. The black hole said I’d like him to treat me like a dog, to tie a collar around my neck and strip humanity from me, because I didn’t deserve it.

It came to pass that I could no longer see his face, because the black hole obscured all of his features.

He said he wanted to marry me.

And what had at first attracted me to him began to repulse me, as that is what the black hole does. It always keeps one in a period of misery, it enjoys the stability of constant suffering through upheaval. When I told him I was leaving him he smiled, or at least, I think he might have. We fucked one last time on his couch and he hooked his hands like fish hooks into my mouth and I begged him to hurt me.

I knew that I deserved nothing.

How did I end up in the desert? Many reasons, I suppose, but I can’t point to anything definite.

I could no longer see my own face.

A child whispered in my ear, “You no longer have to live like this, there is a better way,” and I took it as an omen, even though I didn’t believe in omens.

I lost my waitressing job. I was in so much pain that I just stopped showing up. A malingering kind of pain that I was terrified of running into another man who would end up hooking his fingers into my mouth as he fucked me, another man with a leathery soul who through the reflection of him would show me my own inadequacies.

I kept losing weight, and I lost all of my appetite. It seemed useless to want to eat. Like I wouldn’t really be feeding myself, but the gnawing hole inside of me. And it could never get fully. Not really.

Living with the black hole was not a sustainable life. I knew this from the beginning, though. I knew that my life was not a real life at all, but a slow kind of suicide, in which I ate and drank and tried to hide from myself the alternative to a slow destruction.

But the child sage had whispered to me that there was a better life.

And a part of me, a very small part, believed him.

So I went to the desert.

I stayed there for 1000 days and nights, bored and lonely, and when even the loneliness no longer bothered me and my hunger returned I thought that I had gotten rid of the black hole. I no slipped in its grasp.

I returned home, starving and in shredded clothes, ready to start yet another new life.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, it had merely become dormant, only to re-emerge when I had for the first time in my love, fallen in love.


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As an aspiring writer I have to say that I really really like your voice.

"It seemed to blossom in the night, fed on the rich soil of my nightmares."

Sometimes I feel like Steemit makes me a worse writer.

I feel like I'm always pushing to get that story out. I have a feeling this short story you've written here wasn't written in a single night, yet I find myself pushing out stories in a couple of hours that I should be spending a couple of weeks on.

I have followed you and I'll be paying attention to your posts now.

If you ever want to read one of my fiction stories, feel free. If not..... eh.

I mostly write blog style pieces though since I can't write fiction every day.

Do you mind if I ask you how long it did take you to write this piece? It's a pretty brilliant piece of work.

Thank you jeezzle, I gave you a follow.

This was part of a larger Nanowrimo novel that I never finished - which was a series of vignettes. This one probably took me a few hours but I wrote it stream of consciousness style. I certainly don't write every piece in that short amount of time.

I don't write something for Steemit everyday, and a lot of these are from a backlog of things I've written over the years. Quality can go down when you force yourself to write something for Steemit every day just to get it out there, but also it's difficult to be popular without consistency.

I try to alternate between in depth pieces and more "popcorn" pieces while still maintaining my style. I don't always succeed though.

Very excellent post
Thank you for sharing

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