Joshua Seth Patrick

Reading the writing of someone you know in real life —is like a dagger to the ribs, sometimes, an electroshock jumping in your mess of veins back to your heart, a string of barbed wire around your ankles that you don’t notice until you try to get up and trip your skin all over the string; it’s like missing a step down the stairs and getting that split-half-second adrenaline rush of vertigo and then the breath that comes too fast, after; it’s the most uncomfortable feeling sometimes. Because words are never just words, they’re, they are—bowls, windows, vases, thorns, needles, and it’s like having solid objects hurled at you. Especially when you realize that the words might mean more than just what they are. It’s just: They’re this person’s thoughts on a paper or a page, and you have the irrational, weird thought that it’s just too private, it’s just something not meant to be shared, even if it’s been given freely to your eyes— and it feels like having their blood all over, all over, all, over, your fingers, and it feels like you’ve got their heartbeat in tune with yours now, and also. Also, it feels like dying. And every time you see them, now, every time you speak to them or smile or see them update something on a social networking site, all you think about is that one page or paragraph or sentence they’ve written that’s touched you, that’s grabbed you and never, ever let go, never since, and you can’t look at them the same way ever again, without feeling like you know some terrible secret of the universe that, if you accidentally let slip, might turn and snap all of your bones.(Or maybe this is all just me, m-e, melodramatic as usual. Remember in elementary school when they told you everybody feels the world in different ways? Well, sometimes it’s like I’ve got synesthesia of the thoughts. Always wondered where I’d place on a Rorschach test, seeing bats out of dots and stories out of nothing.)

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