Hypnosis

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Picture this behind closed eyes:

You are standing very still. Breathing slowly. You try to listen to something, but there is no sound. There is no smell. You are standing still, in a wooden house. Your skin feels nothing. What is nothing?

Breathing slowly.

You try to remember who you are, or what you’re doing standing still in a wooden house. Nothing. No memory.

There is a sound.

Muffled voices. Strain your ears to listen to the whispers between lovers. Your consciousness shifts into their conversation and you leave your body to float within their essence. You realize that you only need to hold breath to leave body.

“No sense of sound, light, speech. No information goes into you through these senses. What do you do then?”

“Can I still feel?”

“Feel? How will you..”

“Through my skin?”

“Do you feel through your skin?”

“What do you mean? Of course I feel through my skin, when someone touches me, I feel something. Or if I hold on to a burning matchstick for too long because I’m stoned, I feel pain”

“So…you’ll be able to feel me even if you can’t see me or hear me?”

“Only if you’re close to me”

He shuffles his feet and looks down at the wooden floor, the sharp shadow created by the afternoon sun of a dying winter day streaks over his shoes that have left footprints in the dusty labyrinth that is this house.

He is resting against the wall on his side, and she is in front of him with the window between them.

There is nothing you can see outside the window apart from a glorious light that breaks through the dusty glass.

There is an odd taste in his mouth, reminding him of his grandfather.

He looks up at her and sees her staring outside the window. White light shape her face and she looks older than herself, like the moment before the white oleander touches the ground after falling from a tree.

He whispers “What if I’m far away. Will you still feel me?”

“I’ll call you every day, and write you letters…”

He moves his face close to hers and kisses her on the mouth. She closes her eyes.

The knife cuts open into her stomach and enters her skin, pushing a gasp out of her mouth. He moves in swiftly and holds her hips, pulling her closer to himself with his mouth on hers. She feels the pain rise up her spine and he bites her lip. This pleasure and pain combined transcends her consciousness into understanding that her body is capable of two extreme sensations at the same time.

With the knife lodged in her stomach he puts a hand on her vagina, slowly rubbing her while she bleeds .

Her body lies in a fetal position on the floor. Red stains the dust on the wood and he sits next to her, staring out the window. White light blinding his face. He can breathe now. He is no one anymore, nothing. His fingers interwined in her dead bones. A moth sits on his hand.

It could have chosen to sit anywhere else in the whole room.

You only chose to sit close to him.

Like a ghost.