Chest Cavity: A Short Story

CHEST CAVITY

(Wherein The Rabbit Picks A Branch Under Which To Stand)

by Jelly Telly

Look. The bantam rabbit, see it paralyzed underneath a veteran tree whose trunk from the base splits into three wavering limbs that coax the skies. It poses below the palatial span of branches, a step beyond a dark-mouthed burrow. It is unable to lift a paw to reach the burrow, yet every hair on it’s tiny body salutes the sanctuary like leaves shuddering for the wind. The rabbit rots in stasis beneath the tree of Love. A fear trembles within this animal, branching into it’s flesh as the tree branches into the crust of the earth. The fear lunges down through the bones and blood, where it seizes the mulching flesh of the rabbit’s heart.

Like the fear, the monolith tree’s roots reach fathoms into the dark earth beyond the comprehension of humanity, far beyond the realm of history’s listing of love, or biology’s formula, or philosophy’s explanation, far enough that humanity repeatedly turns to various religions for explanation, equating the rebus of love with the rebus of the gods. In doing this, the origins of love, much as the origins of gods, remain unanswered.
Example: Where the hell did love/god come from? How did love/god begin? And
when did we switch from the noncomplex animalistic love/god to this immersed
parable of confusion?
Instead of questions regarding love, we fiddle with our reactions to it. We are simpleton observers to our own realities and that is befitting, for we couldn’t address the wherewithal of love before bringing it inside of us, figuratively and literally, and allowing ourselves to be in it. Then, at least, we can make acquaintance, begin to know it.
Example: Hello love, how are you and would you mind sticking around?
Moreover, the act of questioning love is a laughable act. We are fools if we attempt to know love in whole. That is a task far beyond the scope of our wisdom. Besides, the wee rabbit is terrified in its palsy. So, let us return to that fear.

The trunk nearest the rabbit hangs low to the ground, a buxom trunk winding down towards the base gravitational yank of the earth. Some body has rutted a single word into the silken bark, like the Marquis de Sade would carve his name into a concubine’s backside. The word: PRURIENCE. Nestled on the branches of the P trunk are juvenile lust and shallow desire, emotionless consideration and careless encounter. Perched at the crown of the tree is the fattened love of sex, fattened for it is fed well by rabbits. The extant love of sex smirks, unashamed by its lack of quality.

Observation #1: The love of sex prides itself in quantity, for those who love only sex are ever in the hunt for more of it. It is calmed by the knowledge of its cyclically insured existence, for as long as we lust in emptiness, we will feed the life of this hollow love with our very breath.

I am the rabbit. It is this particular limb of the tree of Love that has staid my movement, my capacity for growth. Nothing is truly staid in this universe, though, so I circle the dirt in fear. In fear, I circle the dirt beneath the trunk of P. I’ve created a trench of frenzied predictability. I know of love in friendship and love for kin, but for romantic love, I am aware only of the existence and possibilities. My fear ebbs me to practice the habit of indifference. I’ve known the rutted P word for some time now. I’ve become familiar with the sliver of bark containing those harsh letters, letters that hold a hard shell of meaning.

Observation #2: The impermeable shell keeps the seed of indifference contained within my being. There, my heart remains, locked within a single seed and I feign ignorance of its plight.

In the past, when an encounter happened upon me, my interest had always been clear and clearly sexual. For a time, the encounters were pleasant; here a lay, there a lay, everywhere a quick lay. All were void of attachment. I clung to my self alone, kept the others at a long arm’s length from my heart. Whenever the buds of honest love began to sprout from bark belonging not to my favored trunk, the trunk of P from which springs nothing more than more lust, a thick fear would rise to clog my arteries and sabotage the opportunity for love to take root and grow. In response, my blood became cold, the chance lost and the mind blooming with false happiness and celebration for the abeyance of distress. After each lover’s departure, words banded together to form: I am saved once more from pain.
Eventually, the perching love of sex grew obese, weighting the trunk so that it sank further to the ground, pressing me further into the fovea I had manifested. I wondered at the reasons for my loyal adherence to sexual detachment. The diagnosis:

The subject, as I have observed her in her natural habitat, suffers from acute post-traumatic stress disorder, resulting in general distrust and disregard for the opposite sex. Though I have not noted an impairment of her ability to function in social and family life, there is a presence of nightmares, flashbacks, and a general feeling of estrangement when approached by the prospect of a lover and/or romantic relationship. Listed below are the probable causes for this disorder.
1) Experience of blatant sexism and double standards by male role models in early childhood and continuing to adulthood,
2) Experience of abandonment by male role models in early childhood and
continuing to adulthood,
3) Experience of betrayal by female role models in early childhood and
continuing to adulthood,
4) Experience of various types of abuse by male role models in early childhood and continuing to adulthood.

My youthful age tainted the full comprehension of Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts when I first read her words, blinding words like relinquish, benefit of a master, and worlds collapsing. These words mingled with others: kitchen and the three stingers from the same bee: bondage, breeding and boredom. I dreaded those words to such an extent that I vowed never to submit, never to relinquish, never to allow another to assume the role of master over my being. So strong was my conviction that, soon, I lost my indifference to the conquering force of pure adamancy for distrust and disregard of the person, whoever they were, that I loved physically and momentarily. My private battle against sexism was also spurred by the abandonment, betrayal, abuse and the inevitable consequential pain I experienced in my youth. All these factors built a colonnade for my fear, succeeding in kernelling my heart into an unforgiving and frightened knot. As abuse and dishonesty were all that I knew of relations, sexual and otherwise, I expected all future relations to be the same. I assumed they would leave me broken. I wanted nothing to do with the risky offering of my heart or the acceptance of another’s.

Observation #3: Learning the art of heart-valve occlusion is a simple and instinctive task, as is ignoring emotion, though the practice of and results from turning off one’s heart are anything but simple.

I learned the sex-specific skill of dismissing travail without a blink and, in doing so, I triggered the synchronic act of forgoing any chance experience of joy. Like a rabbit that knows naught else but the accuracy of smelling danger and knowing the exact distance to its safe hovel, I traversed the ring of my trench, proud of my apparent strength in keeping the heart inviolable and oblivious to my hopelessness in the face of actual intimacy.
As the trunk of P and its branches bore down shallow upon my head, I began to long for release. There is fresh ground, I realized, beyond this parametric constitution, my fixed praxis of meeting, fucking, and leaving. There is solid ground away from this heavy trunk and its cursory, hollow branches. There is a space outside my fear and small-bound knowledge of pain. Why have I not noticed, before this moment, how little my heart knows of liberty? Now, I know certainly, that my stasis is my own fault, not that of the trunk of P. It is my self that traps my self here, buried in anxious hesitation, for I have always had paws with which to leap from entrenchment.
Now and finally, I want out.

The rabbit leaps from confining trunk of P and scurry blind in the fear. It hurries to the next trunk of the Love tree. The rabbit sniffs the new air, there’s more of it here, under a trunk that sweeps parallel to the ground, its branches stretching toward the horizon. This new trunk, yet unnamed, is a step above the height of its P counterpart. The trunk’s bark is grainy, a slight texture of bumps and fissures in certain spaces, in other spaces smooth like the bark of P. Scratched in a flimsy script is a word, itch. The rabbit wonders at it, rolls it around in the belly to digest its nature. Despite the flashes of rash and discomfort the word brings to the poor rabbit’s brain, the mind decides that this i trunk must be better than the last. This might be where meaning hides, biding time to rise in all those future romantic encounters the rabbit hopes it has. This must be where novel love rests, love for a person and not just for self and sex. The rabbit hop toward the narrow trunk, yearning to brush the carved word with its ears. This trunk must have more substance, must have the utmost passion rabbits are capable of experiencing. The rabbit is wrong in thinking this, but how excited the small beast is to find this precious trunk, to know of accomplished possibility. The rabbit fails to see yet another trunk, the third limb of Love, waiting. The rabbit immerses itself in the dirt beneath this i trunk.

Observation #4: With each experience in life, we are stirred to create a neoteric set of patterns. We dig ourselves another pit and consider ourselves blessed for the transformation and lucky if we manage to make it through to another one.

And so I stand, craven under the prehensile itching arm of the tree of Love. This new space allows examination of patterns shed. Shame creeps through my head and into my heart from the branches. I have been cruel to my lovers. The pride I felt for being resistant and superior to the pitfalls of sexual stereotype (read: must have absolutely nothing to do with actions, words, thoughts, emotions remotely feminine, including but not exclusive to irrationality, overt attachment, and sentimentality, or it’s the death of your spirit) is absent from my palate. In accident, I’ve left the balloon of pride behind, stuck in the trench of old patterns and ready to pop. I examine the snapshots in my memory, an average number comparably, but a number opprobrious when considering that those heads were connected to hearts. Wait. I have to be fair to myself. The track record started out well; my first interest proved one that I could kiss and kiss and kiss. I treated him kindly and with genuine interest, but of course, twelve year olds are bound to grow apart. A few years later, I slipped the cherry to another boy, but he lost it somewhere in a bathroom. Perhaps he flushed the gift down the toilet. The heart clinks at this, but by then, I was well versed in the rules of abandonment from adults and peers alike. I had already begun the formulaic response that I would cultivate and perfect. Oh, the lies I spun while their veritable words tripped into my burrow. I did anything I could to keep them out.

The evidence of my evil:

M #1…3 months First time witnessing another’s eyes exposed. At sixteen, I played eighteen. He said “Move to Vegas with me. I’m opening a racetrack there. I’ll buy you a horse. I could make you so happy”. Silenced by his sincerity and in the sweep of my own naivety, no response issued forth from my mouth to quell his desire. I simply stopped calling him.

M #2…2 weeks First time witnessing my heart exposed, though it was an easy exposure. The heart is given freely knowing the impermanence of the offering. He wept at the departure.

M #2a…2 months The second proposal in the hills of North Carolina, after we consecrated the hood of his Mustang. He said, “I’ve never met a woman like you”. My amused and condescending laughter blew the smile off of his face.

M #3…3 months First acknowledged attempt to establish an honest relationship, without knowing with whom I was getting into a relationship. I tired quickly of his affection, after finding out exactly what type of person he happened to be.

F #5…
Indeterminate This is how it goes: A chance of love, my fear of love, my rejection of her love, my reborn desire of love, her rejection of my love. My burning resentment as she walked to another.

F #6…2 months Breaking News! CRUEL WITCH BREAKS CHILD”S HEART! We regret to inform you that a local girl with recently damaged heartstrings received a second crack by the witch-whose-blood-runs-cold, also local. The recipient (her) had only know the witch (me) for a short time, but that’s all that was needed for this poor child to fall under the witch’s spell. We do not know the reason for the witch’s hard heart and uncompassionate ways, but we are receiving daily reports. As soon as we know, you’ll know. Thanks for tuning in.

M #7…can’t remember This one is too painful to think on. Least to say, I lined him, hooked him, and watched while he flopped around, breathless, in the dust.

M #8…1 month Refer to #2. Please substitute “Paris” for “Mexico”. He was too proud to weep.

M #9…3 months “Let me learn from you. I love you. Don’t laugh. Your eyes like flames. The hottest part burns blue, like your eyes. I love your eyes. You light a fire within me. Do you not feel the same? Why? I love you. Stop laughing. There’s so much you can teach me. You like teaching me, don’t you? I love. I’m afraid of you when you look at me like that. I love you. You never say anything in return. I’ll keep saying it until you do. I love you. Where are you going? I love you. Yes, I do. I swear it. I do know you. No, please stay. Lay your head back on this pillow. Stay with me in my bed. Did I frighten you? I love you. No, wait. Can’t you guess?

M #10…5 months He forgot to butter my bread. I forgot to consider him as a human being.

After M #10, I had a slew of affairs and one-nighters, none of which merit mentioning here. Then, there came an incursion upon my heart, not by a grandly numbered army or armies, but by one man, M #11, and myself. He presented an ideal for me. Enervated by the cold inanition I found in myself after too many short-lived incitements of passion, I began to mold in my mind the qualities I might want from a long-term lover. I desired intelligence, humor, and a generally positive nature. I kept my requirements simple, knowing that asking that much meant hoping for more than I had allotted myself in the past, meant hoping for more than I thought I deserved. Amazingly to me, this man possessed the qualities which I sought. I re-opened my heart for the possibility, but neglected, however, to consider the ways in which I might be an ideal lover, which is why this encounter developed into a battle and not a blessing. I expressed interest in monogamy, in attempting to form a substantial relationship with him. He claimed flattery and another lover, one that he was not willing to give up. I sickened at the thought of it and knew that my previous actions and cruelty in overlapping lovers had returned to pinch my heart. I fought him for the chance of love, copping to beg and plead, despite my pride. He declined.
With my ego thoroughly sacked, I embarked upon a sojourn away from the tree of Love. I felt nothing. I gave nothing. I received nothing. Desire and passion stirred not within the groin of my being but in a place far from me, a place I could no longer recognize. Feeling so lost in my own skull, I did what comes naturally. I returned to the place of my birth. Along came M #12, an old friend with whom I’ve had sexual tension for years. We met for a night of dinner and dancing. I stood in his loft while waiting for him to get ready. The apartment was larger than most I’ve seen in the downtown area. The walls stretched up to the exposed beam ceiling with nary a painting or photograph gracing the cheap drywall. The scant furniture sat far apart from one another, attempting the impression of a full house, but the vacant spaces between were astonishingly cognizant. Ten long strides from couch to chair, eight long strides from chair to coffee table, and all the while placing my feet carefully to avoid cracking various scattered records. After a momentary signal of melancholy, I chose to ignore the vacuum. I faced the door as I waited for him. After the evening, we had unremarkable sex and passed out. In the morning, we stared blankly at each other.
I said:

-I’m surprised.
-At what?
-I didn’t feel anything.
-You couldn’t feel me? Sounded like you could.
-Well, yes, I felt that. I mean, I didn’t feel any passion. It was kind of empty. Forgive me for saying so.
-You expected more?
-I suppose I did. I wanted it to be more. I wanted you to be more. We’ve waited for four years to do this. And now, nothing. I feel empty.
-Huh.
-I’ve heard of feeling differently, of feeling love after sex. And during sex. And before sex. I’ve never felt it, though. I thought I might feel it with you.
-Why?
-Because I do love you.
-As a friend, though. That’s the way I love you.
-Yes. I thought it might transfer over somehow.
-You’ve never felt good after sex? That’s really sad, baby.
-No. I mean, my body is pleased. Elsewhere, I usually feel somewhat dead.


I have done this to myself.


The following night, I dreamt a gray dream. All objects, including myself, were washed with different tints of the same hollow gray. I walked through the dream as a ghost, encountering lovers past. I tried to communicate with them, to tell them of my sorrow at inflicting pain upon their beings as I did, but communication proved futile. They could not hear nor see me. I sat rumbling in frustration at my inability to connect with these people, men and women I had once known so intimately. Unaware of my lack of substance, my transparency in being dead, I screamed at the passing beings for them to notice me and not to abandon me. A kind soul knelt beside me in the river of moving beings, and whispered to me of my death. She instructed me to throw aside my fear of abandonment, for the worst instance is when one has abandoned their own selves. I had already done that. Instead of fearing abandonment, she said to my depreciating ear, abandon your fear. Let go of it and give it to this river before you, then you shall live and love. She handed me a mirror and returned to the swarm of people. Holding the mirror aloft to my eyes, I did not see myself and I saw myself. The gray and bloated face that stared back at me, the one whose jowls had slackened in atrophy, whose hyper-senescence left tracks of canker on the forehead and chin, somewhat resembled my own. I looked away, pained at the image before me. I looked to my hands for comfort, for proof that I was what I had been before happening upon this gray hell. They, too, were putrid and rotting and swollen to disproportion. At the sight of this, I returned my shaking gaze to the mirror. My gaze held blank white eyes. I wept for myself. I wept for those that I had marred in the peak of their love for me.
I woke from the dream and knew the truth of it. I considered myself dead to love, dead to that which is erotic and romantic. I read once that after continued practice of empty-hearted sex, “one’s palate will become insensitive, one will suffer…emotional malnutrition” . I had practiced bereft sex for near a decade. I questioned my ability to return to a state of passion for another person, a rebirth in which I could express love freshly and without bitterness hidden in my words, without the taint of fear. I doubted my self. Why should someone as cruel as I had been be allowed to experience love? I wallowed in despondency, fearful no longer of simple abandonment. Now, I harbored a new fear, a fear that ordered me to discard the possibility of honest and passionate love. This fear told me that I would never be capable of truly loving another in the way that I desired, nor would another ever find me worthy of loving. I listened like an obedient child. I retraced my steps to the trunk of P, abandoning the trunk of i, so that I could consider sex a useful thing, something I could gain from in ways most people consider to be immoral and destitute.
I met with the agent in a local bar. She was a steel-nosed bitch of a business woman. Her hair was pulled back so tightly as to force her eyebrows into a constant mien of expectancy. She praised my beauty while the half-moons under her eyes lengthened to spill into her cocktail. Upon explaining her business, she revealed her motives as a straight-up pimp. Regarding security, she told me I’d be protected. A driver or she would be outside the door for the duration of forty minutes, the amount of time required of me for each trick. Then, I’d move on to the next trick. My pelvis would be a gas station for all types of engines: quick service whenever you need it. I thanked her for the meeting and refused the offer, but, I’ll admit, not before seriously considering the potential of accruing over 2000$ in one night. Her offer left me, as I left her in the bar, with a sense of dis-ease. Had I gone too far with this indifference? I felt the same desperation when I considered another proposal, a proposal that would turn me into a second wife for a wealthy couple. The first wife placed financial security, food, clothing, and a home on the table between us. In return, I would perform the duties of second housewife and sex slave to both their whims. A small morsel of my being resisted as the bulk of me toyed with the offer.

Observation #5: No matter the odds against it, the heart will plead for love.

I feared this woman and all that she represented. My obedience to fear sat in her lap. Stuck between her teeth, with a fleck of salad, was my cowardice, my giving up and over to something I could probably find the will to work through and conquer. Perched on the crown of her head was my death, the reflection of love painted in bland gray tones. That insignificant morsel sang out: No!
Yet still, I am paralyzed beneath the weighty P and lofty i. The burrow that I usually hide within is close by. I could return. I could disappear from love and sex entirely, rejecting all that is offered and not offered, rejecting all that I could attain and know. I could shield myself with intellect, cloak myself in religion. I could adumbrate my voracity for love, skewing it into some thing unrecognizable and disparate. No, little rabbit, you frightened little thing, don’t you be paralyzed and exposed by fear. Don’t you sit outside in the open range and do nothing but watch your predators approach you.

And what do I desire of love? I want passion-addled sex on a moving train with a husband of thirty years. Is that too idealistic? I want love, honest and plain, with a true lover. I want love in flux and steady simultaneously. Yes, love in flux, for to not be would move against the grain of the universe, and love steady, steady in me being with he or she and they being with me. I want a space in this universe for the common desire of two people, the idyllic union. I faith for lucky #13 and tiptoe towards that foreign and elusive trunk belonging to the tree of Love. It is a trunk that wavers more than the others, bucking like a wild beast as it swings from the skies to the ground and back again. Its bark is uneven, bulging in places like cancerous tumors that have healed over and soft, pliable, in others, like my own flesh. I comb the trunk for its name, for the word that speaks its meaning. The word is hidden beneath a whorling knot:
Sentipensante .

I rest my forehead against the grated bark on the trunk of S, praying for osmosis or a translation. I wait, exhaling gravid breath to the bark that churns inches away from my being. The words leak to me: feel, think, sense, sensing and thinking and feeling, it is the same, feeling with the heart, thinking with the heart. To think with heart and all remaining parts, to let myself near that reddened mass would be to find truth within. I could live that truth. So I must think with my heart and to do that, I must perforate the breastplate, expose the chest cavity, and open my heart to chance. I respond, my humanity evident in peril. I feel that habitual fear swell within me, the mistrust and self-destructive force frothing up. I allow it to rise, to bubble over and out like vomit, to fall to the ground beneath me. The dark earth that keeps the tree of Love swallows the mass of fear whole.


Copyright: J. L. Telly, April 2005.