a place without horizon, lost in the fog

There is a pit in your heart. Small, like an almond, but dense, like iridium. It floats in the center of the fleshy fruit, pulsing as the tree shivers and wavers in the cold spring breeze. And there it sits, a tiny clump of misery, like a bullseye, in the center of your being. Your arteries baptize it with fresh blood every morning, and your lungs nurture it with air icy and crisp. And so, inside you, it spins, a pretty little red gem, gathering mass with every passing day--Eve's haphazardly-swollowed pit, embedded inside your pink organs.1

Larger and larger it gets, until you become heavy--arms sluggish, legs languid, eyes drowsy, brain muddy. The days seem long, the nights too short. The sun is so bright that you make it dark, paint it out with blinds and shades. Cloudy days become beautiful, elegant. You open your arms and think you could float forever in the sunless sky, devoid of any direction, light, happiness, mirth--resolutionless, open, eternal. The sea becomes sacred, heavenly. You drift along its currents and think you could lie forever in the bottomless sea, so large, so empty, so eternal.2

You feed your flowers oceanwater and they wither, shrivelled and lifeless. Your cats mewl for fresh milk. Your dogs whimper for a bone. Your children, even smaller pits embedded into their own hearts, want for food. And you, you dream of the sea, of stars during starless nights, and drink your gentleman's poison.3

You conduct conversations with a man with a top hat and cane and lush red coat, blank foreign face reflecting through your crystal glasses. He says: madame, drink up another, drink up another. A Scotsman, you think, and take one from his defracted hands: thanks muchly. You say in your best imitation accent, but he's gone.4

Your husband is Kafka, staring aimlessly at the shore, reading petty books, dying meaningless deaths. Eve's fruit sits heavily in his throat, forever unswallowed. He yearns for darkness in the woods; cries for it at night. He dreams of wandering, lost and frightened, in the forests of high mountains, where no radiowires will go. Walking circles, through the bushes, spiralling down into the heart. The heart. The heart of darkness, pulsing in tune with his own.5

Your heart is heavy with drunken sorrows, you think as you look into the sea. Kafka sleeping. Children stolen. Dogs missing. Cats dead. Flowers decayed. And you yearn, oh, how you yearn, for the sea. The sea, the sea. It calls to you. Calls for you to play in its depths, embrace it like a lover. But you say: no, oh no, I'm not ready yet. Let me bid farewell and kiss Kafka on the cheek.6

Kafka sits on the shore, sunglasses on his nose on a cloudy day. Fish fall from the sky in his mind's eye, and he's screaming: the horror, the horror. You kiss him and watch as he turns into a crow, black, bleak, coarse, flying toward the hills--into the forest. Good-bye, good-bye, he says, good-bye-bye-bye-bye. And you say the same, waving your handkerchief, voice swallowed by the calling of the sea.7

And you go to the sea. The sea, the sea. And plumet to the bottom, heart so heavy that you can't possibly float. And Eve weeps for you.8

The fruit. Oh the fruit. It's not death, no, but a want for it.9