The original opening paragraph to Swimming in your Soul (Part 2) followed by three optional rewrites. We may see more, for the sake of play, for the sake of slapping myself, for the sake of drowning my pain in words.
Kyra moved to the left side of Kieran’s bed. Rog moved to the right. The room felt cold, looked cold, was cold. White sheets, silver metal and the lonely smell of medication greeted the pair. Kyra resisted the thought, the association of that smell with death.
1. Glow. The room glowed the way dreams glow, a Gaussian blur smoothing edges beyond reach. In the center of the room, his bed floated, silence suffocating, thick as humid, a pall, undertaker irrevocable. I moved left, Rog right. We stood, looking like tongueless giants, our feet rooted to the floor of a world forsaken. Us or him, I suppose, much didn't matter.
2. White sheets, silver metal and the medicated smell of death assaulted spinctered nostrils, Kyra to the left, Rog to the right. Kieran's bed, slab still and midnight silent, floated. Kieran did not; his marble visage sheening not of life, not of any damn thing good. Cold, cold so cold it burned, birthed in the vacated residence of hope, a vacuum, expanding under the heart, hoarfrost racing the insipid horary, turning crimson indigo.
3. Between this world and the next is a smell, sui generis, stiletto sharp. It leaves a stain on memory, indelible, palimpsestic, vestigical eidolons haunting the halls of mind, waiting, seeking to connect what is two back into one.
I kept looking from Kieran to Rog, from pale to weathered, from death to life. I thought of papa and of all he had taught, of promises rendered, of change in my pocket, of standing before the cashier wondering if I could pay for my desire, wondering if I had stepped outside the flow and into the eddy of selfishness, if the spinning was of my own making, a mistake of youth, of inexperience, of wanting to hold on to that which could not be held.
Under a piebald sky, I stood as a diver on the edge of a cliff, the heights higher than I had ever dived. The wind felt cold and my skin pebbled, taut like dry leather. I felt my eyes ache in the dry air and my hair stiffened like straw, brittle. Blood rushed to my heart leaving me dizzy, my chest thumping and pounding, the feeling as if I were hammered from the inside, each blow more urgent than the one before. I couldn't not dive. I couldn't live with the what if.
On a different note, below is the opening of a new chapter that is stuck in my throat like a hairball. So I'm coughing it up. Feel free to sweep it away.
Water lapped his toes. Warm. Endless openness. With a single incision, he opened his chest. With a solitary reach, he removed his heart. Held forth, the instrument of bottomless pain, black as pitch, burning his hands like ice, damned as angels bowed before pride and greed, the sword of ambition upon their burning shoulders.
