Mantle by Bastien Lepage

I have lived a noisy life. Lingering within reach of habits and urgencies. Keeping exchanges mechanical and brief. Avoiding eye contact. Dabbling on the margins of something vaster.

I always knew what I wanted. I wanted to understand this flesh, its buoyancy, the dialogue it has with what it isn’t, the flimsiness of it all. I wanted to be alone and taste it long enough to find out.

But the mind cannot exhaust what it sees. There is always something left that cannot be reduced to words. That is where I wanted to go, to the gap exposed when words step back. I wanted to go there and experience it completely.

To understand, I had to find that part of me that was not a piece of space or a bundle of functions. Reason needs something to hold onto. So I focused on the spaces between, the crevasses, the cavities, the cracks, what we give meaning to.

There is silence in listening. I began to hear the noises within the silence, the mundane and detailed tremors. The first effect was an escalation of sensation. I was exposed to a force with a frequency close to my own. The echo stretched the beat. I felt myself progressively undressed and unskinned. I stepped back, then fell away at various rates. The throbbing swelled into disproportionate waves. I found myself overwhelmed. It felt normal.

And then, suddenly, I changed gear. The fleeting forms that girdled me dissolved into condensations that eventually wilted and wasted away. I ceased to distinguish between what was inside and out. I saw the stillness that movement hides. It was very brief.

I became uneasy. I had brief episodes of loss of consciousness with minimal automatisms. There were seizures. There was nothing beneath me, nothing above, no colour, no clamour, no closure. I had no memory of falling. And then I knew. I was not only watching. I was being watched.

I have peeped over the edge and seen it stare back at me. Silence is not an absence. It is a world in and of itself, beyond the pale we know. I have returned, but not come back. I just found a way out.

Some people drink, some collect stamps,
some prefer gardening or cross-dressing. This is our thing. This is our two-word gesture
to life as a statistic. In case of anxiety, just infuse longer.

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