I thought they must have flown through my eye sockets. Or perhaps through a nostril. They couldn't have used my mouth because it wasn't open- I had promised I would never tell a soul, and so it remains. It was once believed that when you die, the last image you saw remained imprinted on the retinas, called “optograms”. Likewise, your name was still on my lips.
I felt my skin, but I couldn’t tell if anything had changed because it happened so gradually. I had lost my point of reference after I had been swallowed by my own body. My skin had sealed over in this hard exoskeleton and I shrank inside it like the insides of a rotten pumpkin, kneeling down as if locked in a dungeon and looking up at the windows where my eyes once were. And I knew that as I shriveled more and more, inside me there was also another, moving down ad infinitum, like the layers of Hell, and my suffering echoed down their throats.
I fell weak in front of you. In all other places where I am the strong one, the bored one; here I was quivering. We looked at each other the way someone on drugs looks into a mirror, quietly obsessed and fixated, reaching our hands up to touch each other in disbelief. Our voices traveled lazily, as if through water. We were so fully absorbed in each other that all other things, like the angels, faded away.
In this little aquarium, we forgot to eat, to breathe, to go to the bathroom, paralyzed outside of each other’s sight. We were like infants who still believe that the instant someone goes out of sight, they cease to exist. Hence the excitement of playing “peak-a-boo”, moving in and out of life and un-life as seamlessly as liquid.
We grew gills and scales on our backs, our eyelids receding back into our foreheads. We forgot language and humanity and God.