by Christina Tudor-Sideri

 

I want you to feel this
the way time moves through me
not as a line
but as a trembling interval
a breath before the word
a pulse after it leaves
I live in this pause
my lungs rise
my lungs fall
each inhale a claim
each exhale a surrender
learning over and over
how to dissolve
into flesh
into desire
into the vanishing of myself

I remember nights
pressed to sheets
darkness folding me
holding me
too tightly
abandoning me
and I feel it still
in the swell of the sea
its waves pressing
against my ribs
against thought
against want
its darkness a presence
a body I cannot touch

The instant arrives
it floods my veins
presses into my heart
into my thighs
and I know
I am undone
even in silence
even in longing

Sometimes it softens
a moment blooms
a forest leans toward itself
trees demanding shadows
trunks entwined
shade moving over shade
and I lie there
skin to wind
breath to leaf
I enter the second
as if time itself
is the touch I crave
as if pleasure
could merge with perception
without surrender

But the river returns
flooding me
desire stretching absence
into ache
into lust
love braided with loss
I wait
for the brush of a hand
for the voice that never comes
and every second
lengthens
my body shivering
with the memory
of what cannot remain
yet I want it still

I wander cemeteries
stones lean like lovers
cold beneath my lips
graves heavy into the earth
the forest above
leaves whispering
waves crashing
desire and death intertwined
skin pressed to stone
to soil
to tree
to memory
vanishing into flux

I linger in thresholds
doors ajar
always almost
never fully
haunted
by the girl I was
by those who vanished
shadows persistent
shivering against me
I press back
even as I fade

I write
write the trembling
write the wound
write from the body
that remembers
what the mind forgets
my hand slower than time
each word
like lips
like breath
fading into me
holding the instant
long enough
to feel it
to feel you

Time erases me
and yet returns me
to beginnings
again
and again
each silence
another attempt
another confession
my body worn
my body trembling
alive in absence
alive in hunger
alive in loss

And I remain here
haunted
trembling
alive
in the flow
that does not end
listening
to the music of disappearance
to the Black Sea tides
to the Black Forest leaves
to death
to love
to desire
learning still
how to endure
how to want
how to vanish
how to be
through what passes
through me
through you
through time

 

 

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Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue; the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, and the upcoming An Absence of Sea and Reliquary: A Phenomenology of Kept Time.