Journal of a pulsing womb of eternal shape who works at a Starbucks in upstate New York

You’re so funny! Spicy today! And my heart beats so frantically I can feel it behind my eye sockets, pulsing, pushing blood and confusion into my tear ducts which feel now like little galaxies at the mouths of black holes, on the verge of being swallowed up into an unnamable void, leaving behind no trace of itself once so swirling and massive and many-planeted and now reduced, reduced to nothing, less than nothing, its smallest motions taken for intent, taken for humor, humorous intent.

Mind flits through space-time and shaken espressos, a single frazzled hair at the edge of my vision taunting me with its nuance, the fineness of what I can perceive within the magnitude of what I am, what I know.

I am quietly terrified by the humanness of human lives.

How I love to be alone and afraid and nothing like anyone, how I am soothed by the terror and awe of my own isolated existence.

How I love what I am left with when I do not command my forebrain for dear life to turn on, on, on, when I do not command it and it does not fill in any gaps, and the gaps are all there for me to see and how I fear them and love them and curl up inside them and let them fill me, us like two dust storms becoming one.

How I love this chaos that is mine alone and how I do not want to be pulled out of it, pulled into human life, pulled into talk.

But how people talk to me nonetheless.

And how I talk back and they laugh, they say I am clever and funny, and I do not know why, because all I have done is try to utter anything at all into this empty, floating idea we share and call conversation.

What can be uttered is still unutterable.

Leave me alone to be terrified, leave me alone so my mind might split and sink itself into some sundark aperture, expanding, sideways, tilting, shooting electricity to opposing poles; let my amygdala pulse and my forebrain laugh and let these shocks alternate, back forth back forth back, and let me scream in the middle of it where I belong. I am happy here, content.

I watch time swallow us all alive and I watch time give birth to us already dead.

Do not speak to me, you. Strange with your flesh and your face and how you call me by my name, remind me I have one.

You make talk so small I cannot even find it where I am, hovering behind this name in some untold galaxy where words are swallowed by a magnitude that drinks all of earth like a particle, a piece of dust in the storm, swirling, down into some giant vacuum like a mouth at the bounds of boundlessness.

Forgive my wide eyes, I am only alarmed and uncertain and quietly utterly mad.

My smile is small and aimless, only a habit, conditioned into the reflexive body of my organism. Behind it I thank my deafness for saving me from aim, for leaving me alone to be alarmed and uncertain and quietly utterly mad.

It is nice here in this quiet madness and I need no aim. No sound, no language, I am not human, I am a pulsing womb of eternal shape, I work at a Starbucks in Upstate New York.

Coerced into cooperating with a system that does not serve us, we find humanity in cooperating within it.

Expelled into the debt of an unforgiving existence, we find, in transcendence, some brief repayment.

I sit on the porch and am swallowed into galaxies, collapsing into them as their edges suck at me; I am, I become, a nebula of unconscious mind, wrapped in pillows, blanket, recliner, porch, spring air and rain and Syracuse street, wrapped in it like a black hole is wrapped in outer space even as it is unfathomably larger than outer space because I am so much larger than this town, so much larger, so much more massive, dense, heavy, empty, like pure antimatter wrapped in blankets on a porch in Syracuse and tomorrow I will be in a green apron again, The Employee, calling out drinks to customers I will pretend to hear as I grasp to meet their most likely request. A straw? Absolutely, here you go! Have a good one! And inside, quietly, I am a galaxy, swallowed by itself, steaming milk, queuing shots, hearing nothing, transcending time.

My mouth spreads open and swallows my face in membrane, my skull pink like tongue, esophagus extending out of my open throat to unwrap me with slick muscled boundlessness.

I laugh, laugh, laugh.