shorthand

Music loud like buzzing against the wind, when you don't want to go home because the sun meets your bare skin with a kiss. Or the cable-knit sweater rubbing opposite your skin, when you're alone in bed with legs inextricably tangled in the sheets. Dirt under your nails from days of unshowered, unadulterated nature, walking in the dust and breathing in air and looking at muted stars.

You wrote a story last night, one about the sun and how it spun, and how the earth followed it angrily, exerting a pull of its own. Gravity, where even the earth is equal to the sun. As in somehow, you are exerting an force equal to the loud buzzing of the music. Perhaps sound doesn't apply to gravity, or gravity doesn't apply to sound, but something about the music settling in your chest feels like heaviness--and while gravity isn't heavy, it feels that way.

The music keeps going, growing and growing, until it's the heady thrum behind your eyes in a migraine and you can't feel anything except your temples. Everything just needs to be beautiful, but it is loud, so loud, like a drum of cicadas, or a star thrusting itself into combustion, or all of these things echoing at the same time in the small pockets behind your eyes.

It has only been five minutes.

You try to scratch at the sweater rubbing against your skin, or swat at the sunlight that warms your body with the heady sense of ultra-violent cancer--violet, not violent, but still there is something persistently violent about the sun's rays' refusal to fall on the ground, how they pick and nip at every bit of skin until you are dry with white lips of skin pursing upwards with gravity.

Six minutes now. Breathe faster, smooth the sweater, ignore the sun, and maybe the music will slow.

It started when you were small, when your hands were still balls of white flesh that curled into themselves and never wanted to let go. It started as a light tickle against your stomach, and it was soft like when you pass over a cloud for the first time and realize its fragility. But as you grew, the tickle spread into something more like the thrum of a hummingbird--still impossibly small, yet now impossibly persistent and heavy and thick with energy. It grew hard, like when you pass through a cloud for the first time and realize that its fragility is actually hiding a wave of energy. Like passing over and then through a cloud, it happened in a second. You were a child with a tickling wisp against soft baby skin, and then you were you, chased down by a wild thrumming that wouldn't stop.

Sixteen minutes, one minute too long, but the music hasn't stopped.