I get lost in my own bed.
It seems endless. Behind my head, I have miles and miles of mountains. My pillow, always too hard. It’s not easy to fall asleep. Like one of the boulders, it will never get softer.
Because there are thousands of mountains and only one of me.
Too soft to squeeze them hard enough.
My duvet is crushing me. I don’t know where it ends or how much it really weights. Its flowery pattern suffocates me, its valleys don’t bring me peace. Only the roots, ever-growing, slowly keep doing their thing, regardless of my body. Climbing down my bones, climbing down my veins. Feeding on me.
Suffocating me.
Somewhere else, an inch away from my feet, lies an ocean. I cannot see it, but it sings me to sleep every night.
Silently, I dream about the waves reaching my toes, filling me with water.
Starting with the legs, ripping apart my muscles and digging hallways between my cells. Then the hips, stomach, and finally lungs. To feel the drops of salty water escaping my lips, ears, eyes.
Only because of the power too great to contain inside of such an inexperienced body.
But every single time I gather the courage to try and stretch my legs enough to reach the oceans, the sheets are still too heavy.
Irritating.
Because I could just crush the pillows like nosy, slimy cockroaches. Squeeze my fingers, then lick them clean.
And I could rip out every flower. Drag them all through the tunnels they hollowed in me and throw away into the deep waters.
Fill the bleeding woulds with ocean, creating the divine beverage. Drink it straight from my own arteries and sacrifice to the moon.
But I’m so small.
Smaller than a grown woman should be, though a little bigger than every child in the world.
Burning weaker than a spark.
And even if one of the shadowy figures, who I can sometimes see when the clouds glow transparent, wanted to leave their city of angels to put their hands over my shoulders and lean on them, hovering over me, in only seven seconds I would be gone.
The earth would pull me down to her roots, because I’m so tiny.
Still too small for love.
Too fragile for intimacy.
Julia is a queer self-taught writer, musician and visual artist from Poland. In her work, she explores the topics of spirituality, raw emotion and creation, with elements of fantasy. Their biggest inspirations are nature, organicism, philosophy and horror.
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