Mania

Transcript Version:

Mania

I can feel it in my head, a growing, ever-expanding complex. I begin again to be god, in control of pain and pleasure, mixing them into everything I do. The threads begin to pull me up and away from safety to a truer state of being.

Why should I return to reality when I can swim in the atmosphere just at the edge of space? I poke my fingertips through the Ozone, watch as they freeze and break off floating out into the vast nothingness. Let the intrusive thoughts win.

Place your lips to the border of what is safe and drink in the frost-bitten cold. Look down to the earth below, know that yes, I am god of all that I see, nothing can hurt me, touch me, unless I let them. Their hands traveling the expanse of my flesh that stretches across the sky, begging to feel me more but I am too far from the ground.

Even in this cold dead space, I have never felt more alive. As I reach out the universe reaches back, it runs its hands through my curls and tells me there is no such thing as consequences when I am: creator, creation, creating.

Making the world bend to my will, atoms dancing around me, your eyes lock with mine and you see the supernova in them so when my frozen lips lock on yours you can't help but taste the atmosphere too.

While the world sits in silence I will whisper down to them, saying:

Overlapping Voices:

Look at me

See me

Hear me

Love me

Give me

Love everything

Give yourself to me

Give me everything you are

Give me all of you

Notice me

Look-

Shhhh, listen to the spin of the Earth and know that I am the one who spins it, and when I come down, the twine that's strung from me to the atmosphere breaks loose and I can feel it shrinking in my head and once again I am stuck on Earth.

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Taryn Markle is an English and Creative Writing major at NKU with a minor in Theater. She has been published for poetry in the Ambient Heights Anthologies and drip lit magazine, was invited to read at the Kentucky Women Writers Convention in 2018, is a 2019 GSA Creative Writing Alumni, and is published for fiction in Loch Norse Magazine Issue XII. She creates pieces that explore the chaos that is everyday life, emotions, and relationships. Her friends can attest that though she often cannot speak a single coherent sentence, she is quite skilled with a pen in her hand.