Entry #37

Auscultation
by Leon van Eck


And I really thought I was fine until I vomited up all that blood into the basin in the public restroom in Edgecombe Park. The guy standing at the closest urinal zipped up and walked out without a word. Something was broken inside of me, after all.

I met a man on a bridge yesterday. I was looking into the muddy water, that inviting swirl, feeling its inexorable influence over my body. He pulled me back from the railing, saved me from myself, the person I had decided to become. I went with him, willingly. We were explorers after that. It was uncharted territory for me, this rhythm of the universe beating in every capillary in my brain. Only if it is turned off would you notice a sound that you’d been hearing your whole life. The scars on his back were a roadmap of his past. I touched them in the dark, wishing I had been responsible for those traces, that they were my doing; a shared history. He fucked me with a hushed urgency. We never spoke: I felt as if our whole encounter was taking place underwater.

At dawn we lay there, with him restless like the throbbing November sky, and I impassive as the tree outside his window, waiting for the inevitable. The rain of blows began as the first drops blurred on the glass. I took them all, willingly. He thought he had fixed me, but something was broken inside of me, after all.