I Wish I Was Cold As Stone

Her hands were pressed against the stone.  The cold had run down from her fingernails, now as grey as the rock, through her hands and along her wrists, slowing the blood in the blue strings of her veins, spreading up her arms and into her chest.  She willed her heart to stop pumping so that it wouldn’t stab with every beat.  The tingling in her folded legs had long since faded, leaving her numb under the stiff folds of her jeans.  She had worn them for weeks, sleeping or awake, not bothering to wash them or fold up the fraying cuffs to keep them out from under her feet when she walked.  Now they were soaked through with old rain the ground still held, making her skin underneath pale and wrinkled.

            If she noticed the cold, she didn’t show it.  She didn’t lift her gaze from the words etched in the stone, but traced the letters with her eyes one by one, spelling out the words, examining every sound, every syllable until she reached the end and could start over.  Her lips moved, forming the words, allowing the sounds to echo inside her, so different from the way they sounded months before when she spoke them out loud.  The idea of pushing the sounds out of her mouth to strike the solidness of the air around her head did not seem possible.  Only her eyes and lips moved.  Short hours passed and she did not shift to relieve the strain that pulled across her shoulders from being hunched over.  It was a constant battle- the desire to stop the hurt that threatened her rationality and the need to feel physical pain in her body. 

            Others came.  They talked to her, or they didn’t.  It didn’t change.  Their presence, their words didn’t move her or alter the position of each finger laid carefully on the stone.  Darkness came and her eyes would have strained to see the letters if they weren’t already carved into her.  Her eyes eventually closed, but moved behind the dark lids, still tracing the M’s and the B’s and the L’s.  If rain fell, if fog moved in, if frosted dew covered the dry grass, she didn’t know.  She knew the sun wouldn’t rise, the day wouldn’t come to warm the stone or dry the earth under her.  She imagined the world floating to a stop, ending orbit, slowing its broad spin through the night so that the thin crust of the moon overhead would be the only light to ever again be cast down on that place. 

            It was a resting place and so her body rested, arrested in its vigil, endless in its watch.  There was no walking of souls, no howling winds, no haunted voices that whispered in her ear.  There was only her body, slowly dropping into the ground, absorbing through the creases in the rock that formed the words her mind repeated.  There was only herself, woven into the grass, seeping down to the dirt, falling piece by piece, so slowly that no movement could be seen.  She was whole on the outside, but cut through the middle with weakness, veined like marble.  Two hands on the stone and nothing else.