proximoception (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
proximoception) wrote2017-01-15 11:16 pm
proximoception) wrote2017-01-15 11:16 pm
(no subject)
Drunk, the surface of the water busy at her nose and eyes with endless cold karate chops, she thought about the monster she must appear to anyone looking, given the distortions of objects in the swimming pool. She couldn't recall if her face would seem too far outward from its head or too deep in, a failure that reminded her of how in childhood she'd failed to tell apart concave and convex for years before someone pointed out about the cave. Her face was now either back in that cave or pushed out in front of it like a mask-shaped secret entrance stone, with light and air biting in through the cracks behind, burning the mosses and creatures that only breathed cave. She coughed and came up some and coughed and much later looked down. It was hard to place through the stubborn ripples, but seemed stranger than telescopy. Her lower parts seemed both more distant and initially larger than they ought to, and also pulled off at an angle from those above, though not precisely to the side - if anything, they were more directly below, since her legs seemed to taper to ribbons then nothing. As she stayed there the difference resolved into just one of color, and there too she couldn't find the right words for it. The subtle blue gathering fog of up here was not the subtle blue gathering fog of down there. They were two distinct ways to drown sight in too much of what's clear.
...
The knowledge hadn't helped him make decisions better, but had altered which actions could seem like options at all, so it was easy to underrate. It felt like the same crossroads again and again, the same fifty/fifty, the helplessness before a sky that reached down through one's mouth into what should have been unfathomable and pulled out a shocking assent. Sometimes he tried to make mistakes of the sort he once had, just to see, but these efforts ran out of requisitionable oxygen before he'd crossed the room. As any just seeing will, past perhaps seventeen, he'd become convinced: tours now were trips where one wished to not state one's business. Though he sometimes felt a tourist inside a business constructed from half a lifetime of forced assents. No more so than when mistaken, and since the non-mistakes were unobtrusive, didn't register in memory as having been decided at all, the skies inside and out in all agreeing, he more or less thought of mistakes as his business.
...
When they met they tried to explain this about themselves but fell silent partway through a second round of lattes, a drink that both of them hated but had ordered to not seem strange.
...
The knowledge hadn't helped him make decisions better, but had altered which actions could seem like options at all, so it was easy to underrate. It felt like the same crossroads again and again, the same fifty/fifty, the helplessness before a sky that reached down through one's mouth into what should have been unfathomable and pulled out a shocking assent. Sometimes he tried to make mistakes of the sort he once had, just to see, but these efforts ran out of requisitionable oxygen before he'd crossed the room. As any just seeing will, past perhaps seventeen, he'd become convinced: tours now were trips where one wished to not state one's business. Though he sometimes felt a tourist inside a business constructed from half a lifetime of forced assents. No more so than when mistaken, and since the non-mistakes were unobtrusive, didn't register in memory as having been decided at all, the skies inside and out in all agreeing, he more or less thought of mistakes as his business.
...
When they met they tried to explain this about themselves but fell silent partway through a second round of lattes, a drink that both of them hated but had ordered to not seem strange.