Senseless

She held her hands to her face. Pieces of it were falling away, jagged edges like broken crockery. The cupped her hands over her eyes, trying to hold them in place, but as if the solid pieces of her eyes were water, they slipped through he fingers.

More pieces of her were falling away. Without eyes she couldn’t see them. She saw blackness as she felt her hands unravel. Her shoulders chipped. Her abdomen fragmented.

She was a reflection in a broken piece of glass. Everything shifting and out of proportion and in disarray. Her mouth fractured. She had no throat with which to speak.

The pieces of her that fell away were disconnected; seconds passed and she felt less and less. There was no sensation where her hands had once been. Sight, touch, taste, gone. Then her nose; there hadn’t been any blood to smell, but she hadn’t realized how fragrant even the air was until there was no scent at all. Perfect olfactory silence.

How human was she? With only ears with which to hear? And now birdsong, breath, win rustling leaves, was disappearing? She was thoughts, a consciousness in a cosmos that she could not see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.

What was a person, stripped of their ability to connect with the world? Outside herself - her mind, the essence still in tact, still thinking, marveling at the horror of being unraveled – Pieces of her body floated, nebulous, in the approximate curve of her spine, the arch of her collarbones, the swell of her cheeks.

How could she have worried about this body? It was gilding. The barest bones version of herself was unseeable. How little she was, without an envelope.

Consciousness blurred. Was this it? The final part? If she had a mouth, she would laugh.

In the end, before consciousness too fell apart, more physical than she’d thought, no less important than her envelope body, she thought: I do not have a soul. I am my soul. I had my body. 

Art by Alex Cherry

Text by Lucie MacAulay