Sound

No place knows me more intimately. I come undone and am made whole here. It's the only place I make the sound. A cry. A foreign calling. I can never anticipate its arrival but it always meets me when I’m cloaked in the weighted droplets of a shower. It's neither high-pitched nor loud. It’s introduction is sickeningly gentle considering the fury and destruction behind it. It sounds like falling or the sound a chasm would make if it swallowed you whole; expansive, deep, wide, open. Like the struggle and release of splitting an orange, I akin it to the tearing open of ribs - to let the soul speak what the mind can't comprehend. Agony. It moves you from standing to cowering. Heaving accompanies the sound. And wet. Wet? But from what? Tears and a snot-covered face washed away by the shower water. Wash it away until it is nothing. Until I'm nothing. I make the water hotter just so I can feel something other than the rupture of my soul.

Scalding feels better.

Scalding heals better.