I Desire by Hannah Elizabeth Jones

I desire

•  warmth

•  in the light,

•  the evaporation of water.

•  from above,

•  calling for posture.

•  Eric says my posture is so bad it hurts.

•  At least I try. (I treasure a strained voice speaking ideals.)

•  like a parent

•  , taller than me (when I was a child).

•  , breathless in desire for my betterment.

•  (I don’t speak to them more than necessary).

•  from below,

•  like in the heavens;

•  post-life

•  (coffins of wool and velvet).

•  Do coffins continue to sink with time (thick, brown sediments piled on top; an illusion of gravity)?

•  pre-life.

•  Where do babies come from?

•  The heavens, of course.

•  Falling is like reaching too hard (down).

•  like those tomato plants that grow upside down

•  and taste delicious.

•  and are still reaching.

•  indiscriminately,

•  and ice cream, the way cold can taste warm when you’re happy,

•  and eternal melting.

•  and the crunch of waffle cones (resistance, punctured).

•  and summer clothes; the way they hang on my body lightly,

•  floating on me.

•  and me floating in the water,

•  my hair splayed in blue stillness.

•  My hair is short now (less striking in water but ironically lighter and more apt to float).

•  and melting, boiling, entropy.

•  in darkness,

•  the suffocating stink of it

•  . I heard that hot air rises so I added a second mattress.

•  , like when we sweat from the unknown

•  fight

•  or flight.

•  the restlessness of night

•  the predestined failure of reaching,

•  like sunflowers

•  and dreams

•  the boy who thinks he’ll be president someday.

•  I thought that two years ago too.

•  for all self-diagnosed insomniacs

•  , the romanticism of sleep diseases.

•  . I tell people I get more nightmares than I actually do.

•  Would you rather die by burning or freezing?

•  Rephrased:

•  would you like to be noticed when you die?

•  would you like to go out in light and energy?

•  or drift from existence?

•  My vote should be clear.

•  cold

•  ,” sounds like a lie.

•  . I divulge that

•  this is dramatic irony. Does that make it any less true?

•  Cold is truth because ice is clear.

•  this is the sincerest of delusions,

•  the result of a rash decision.

•  only true for a moment in time so infinitely small we call it zero

•  (infinite, like where the aliens are).

•  (infinity is a concept of darkness and coldness, for it progresses to where the sun cannot go).

•  . Infinitely small can go in the direction of negative numbers or fractions.

•  So there are three infinities.

•  The hot one, big like the sun.

•  The middle one, disappearing into itself.

•  The small one, in debt. We don’t talk about it much.

•  death;

•  a heat death.

•  Some physicists say the universe will end when matter diffuses so much that the force of the vacuum overcomes the force of gravity.

•  Everything would be ripped apart and left stagnant, too far away to exchange heat energy,

•  so it would be a very cold death

•  with a very appealing name.

•  ness

•  , the cutting catharsis of

•  an ice cube in the elbow (a therapist’s trick).

•  a knife to the wrist (a bad habit).

•  (only when I’m warm).

•  and the way it shatters,

•  falling icicles (falling from warmth, still piecey and ready to kill).

•  falling while ice skating (he hates me because I skate slowly, cautiously, and with too many sweaters on to pad the inevitable).

•  things

•  of blues and steel.

•  The things too strong to burn

•  like metal

•  or the sky

•  or me.

•  The things they call framework.

•  How do tiny screws hold such big paintings?

•  Why do cornerstones get written about so much?

•  and the way they form fractals (like tongues of flames don’t).

•  mildness

•  of temperature,

•  but I pretend I don’t, because everyone does.

•  “I’d rather burn.” I don’t think that’s true, Hannah.

•  No, it is.

•  Mild is

•  acknowledging the lies,

•  or expecting something to hurt, and it does not.

•  of speech,

•  like a whisper

•  so warm on ears, but hisses like cracking ice.

•  we whisper what is too dangerous (cold) to say loud.

•  like my mother,

•  but not when she screamed (throwing the medicine drawer on the ground).

•  progenitors define preferences.

•  I had a therapist for four weeks that looked exactly like my dad.

•  I hate that therapist now.

•  of movement.

•  Glass is the most viscous of liquids.

•  Glass is a liquid?

•  Yes, the most viscous.

•  Tearing up in the windowpanes of old houses, warped and dripping and maddened by time.

•  Glass is movement with clarity.

•  I know a boy who once ran through a glass door because he was drunk.

•  Reaching and shattering all at once.

•  of a pendulum

•  that has swung for an infinite amount of time.

 

 

 

Hannah Elizabeth Jones is a sophomore student in Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been published in undergraduate literary magazines such as Cellar Door, Campus Blueprint, and Brown’s Sketchbook. She is the 2015 winner of the Steven Coleman award for undergrad literary achievement within Delta Psi literary arts fraternity, and she currently writes a humorous food column for the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel.



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