origin of grievance; pt. 1. The man.

(this begins with the post below; feb 11)


He heard the no, too.
It fractured his world and thrust choice itself like a knife into the cracks. Nor had he ever thought, and this, his first thought, was followed, menacingly, by the urge of his second thought. Invisible but for a ferocious and terrifying inflation, or implosion, or both at once, it tried to come; his stomach, like a sickly balloon engorged with bile and dark filth, expanded beneath the skin of his belly. He could feel the little navel that had once amused him pressing outward like the bulbous eye of a fish, straining against the hot tissue of his belly. The only scar on his torso, desperate to open again, to spill his guts out, to free him from the darkness that had swallowed his freshly born mind.
His second thought was no near the succinct affirmative she had experienced. No, his was a desperate and frightful feeling, not a thought at all, simply a conscious sense, such that he demanded his next act of cognition to imitate the first, and he spoke in his mind the only word he had ever heard uttered: no.
There was no further thought, but instead a forceful repression. He went back to his simple life as it was, barely recognizable, as one to be executed with the notion that, no, nothing will ever be the same. He wept and hid from her, covered himself and concealed his new consciousness.