Desire and Delirium
by Andrea Conway

Beginnings don't really make much sense.

Everything doesn't have to start somewhere; that's a lie. It's a Dream-thought. Whatever the story, you always come in
after it has started, and you leave before it's finished. Even us. Especially us.

Maybe there was never a time when it wasn't this way.

My eyes might be shut or maybe it's just too dark to see but I can feel breath across my face and it's as tangiable and
as real as a hand, then it is a hand pulled like a whip across my aching mouth, a suffocating rag or an eveloping jelly ...
jelly ... children's parties, the clowns dancing and the balloons tethered to the ground.

"Del, shush. It's me."

Like some sort of mist. There are two of him/her. One travels up the outside of my body like a silk scarf that covers my
whole skin, filling the naked expanses and the nooks and the crannies and moulding itself around my every angle. Hot
and cold. The other is inside me ... starting in my lips, and my other lips ... and spreading outwards and upwards and
inwards, a chemical, a feeling, another entity. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they burned
witches for being possessed by the Devil. I know, I was there burning too.

It's not Lucifer inside me, though s/he claims to know Morningstar as intimately as Morpheous does

. Orchids.

Like a strange tide, all out of synch with the phases of the moon. Desire's outside me and inside me, against me and
with me, and I can feel myself slowly dripping apart at the joints, my skin turning to liquid and my bones into dust and
they beat through my heart with a thousand wings. I can't tell where s/he ends and I begin. Beginnings never make any
sense, ends less so.

"Del, shush. It's me."

With a whisk and whisper of feathers brushing against my breasts (tonight we both have them, tomorrow only Desire
will, perhaps). Shaking comes running up my bones, s/he withdraws from my veins and settles inside my stomach,
outside my lips, twisting like a foetus. Writhing in amniotics.

"Del, shush ... it's us."

Lizards running along the floor.

Quivering increases and I know I am going to loose control. Desire doesn't care if I stay together.

S/he breaks apart within me ... trickles out of my vagina, swirls skipping smokelike across the floor, a wraith in the
moonlight. The sunlight; "if you prefer the day, Del". Clouds drift across the ceiling; scattergraphs trace themselves on
the wall.

Reverse polarity.

I am in pieces. They hover and twist into shapes while s/he stands at the foot of the bed - rug - tent - bath - as solid
and undeniable as the ground (the ground is merely a collection of equations woven together by chance, hope and a
shared interest in not being vapour) and the music gets faster and faster andfaster andfasterand
fasterandfasterandfaster ...

"Pull yourself together ...

"All round the world, Del ... they are us. Every single mindless fuck and loving embrace and breathless desperate fumble,
every rape, every look of longing, every pure passion and twisted, depraved exhaltion ... all of them are us, little sister."

Love is born, s/he says. Love is born of Desire and Delirium.

Cradle to grave, chalk on my fingertips. Consumed.

Endings never make much sense either.