Some Thing Keeps Me Down On Sunday

by Divine Angubua

Generally, the feeling is this unyielding thing. Pain. Paired with the quiet, warm indifference one comes to approach life with, and the final sense of a beast lurking somewhere within my story. I get this feeling as I lie in bed, simmering, propped up on two pillows, arms stretched out over a blue blanket. I wish for the power to rise up and eat. Outside, the city roars with the cries of cars sprinting down the main road. A loud, vague clanging reverberates in the distance like a monkey sounding a metal death cymbal. I don’t hear birds. 

There is so much light here. The light presses against the window. So prying. For a moment, I have to look away. I climb out of bed, and feel the thing in the slowness of my first steps, right at the curve of my kneecap, where a bone, like an iron pin, slowly pushes its way between the tibia and the femur to prick the smooth patella. I get the impression that the beast is circling. Where in my story am I that there is something to want? There is the sense of an ending, yes. But it is morning. Things cannot end while the birds sing — which they don’t — and the grass is still wet and green. I figure everything is only just beginning. In the corner of my eye, I see a shadow strike north like an axe. I take another step to the door.

Before I get out of bed, however, I play with myself. And I feel the thing. The effort to lose myself, to self-immolate by orgasm. I squeeze it out from the tip like the final drop of toothpaste from a withered tube. I get dizzy quickly, then slowly, as shock passes over me, imprinting the knowledge that someday I will be dead.

The thing happened again recently. I was having sex, when suddenly the act became a never-ending bit frozen over time. Everywhere turned cool until I couldn’t rise anymore; or rather, until I realized that I wouldn’t rise any higher than this, and nothing would ever feel better than this moment. I infused every thrust, pull, choke, and breath with my energy. The last of myself. I sweated so much that my partner paused. His eyes shined with marvel. He asked me if I was okay. “Yeah, all good,” I said, ignoring the feeling that the side of my face was melting off. When I orgasmed, my vision went black. Or perhaps my eyes shut, gloriously weightless, as the body wrung itself. My left eye whorled with the sensation of blindness. I found it slightly spectacular. Afterwards, in the bathroom mirror, the bloodshot eye looked back at me. The red veins rose atop the creamy sclera and pumped. The thing, gleaming like the exposed roots of an old, ugly tree.

In my bed, before I get up to seize the day, this all feels too much. SHAME, I think, the thin word, flashing under my eyelids like a signal. I pass my hands over my body. I smooth my chest. Pinch my right nipple. Feel the flat tummy, the belly button. I wander down to the sticky heat of my thighs beneath the blanket. I pluck a single wiry hair from my bush. Then another. For a brief second of pain, I feel truly awake. I glitter at the edge of the void. That’s when I get up.

The thing inside me shows plainly on my face. In the underlying gnarl of my lip. The dark light in my eye. The grout-white of my smile. Sometimes, it is the brutal grace of my collar bone, the trembling of my heart in everything I do. The thing is the sweet bodily spasms as I lay the weights down at the gym. It is hungriness which turns into honey on my tongue as I watch my phone, still connected to its charging cable since yesterday afternoon, ring and ring from beneath my bedsheets. Up float the letters, “Father,” “Mother,” “Friend,” like small bones in the poisoned soup. This, the beast watches from his seat in my periphery. Where the thing appears, the beast is not far behind.

Looking into the mirror, I once again knew that someday I would be dead. I grabbed my phone, opened a document labelled “Writing Journal,” and jotted down a short story idea about a simple Black boy. “He rations his happiness for so long,” I wrote, “Until Death comes to collect its debt.” Everyone who knew him is not very sad when he dies, because what is life if not the rationing of happiness over time? “He defers his unhappiness for long enough that it is called a good life,” I added.