To Help With Living

To Help With Living After an umpteenth gathering of spirits,
that is, personal spirits of the human body entrenched in a doubt that has viciously plagued every
hero and casual witness of my family line,
I realized that you were on the edge of glory. While I was soaking in the sun, collecting menthol
ash at the back of my throat and extinguishing it with probiotics prescribed to not-me, you were
perusing a place that I had given you as a gift in a lifetime prior,
when we were lovers of unequal passion. I was watching you
with an emotion others never claim, except for the times they announce their triumphs and lavish
in the attention of a million hidden eyes, in a way that was safe only in the 90s.
That is to say, I could not fully possess the emotion because, at that point, it had been long
claimed by you. While I soaked - an act of inherent passiveness, of receiving that which is given
freely and dangerously and openly - you absorbed the definitions of more active endeavors and
spat them out at the world in a way that I had hoped to do.
Perhaps I should have mentioned this to you when
we were bound by the interstices of our glorious journeys, you and your steed of insistent
passion having collided with my vampiric obsession at the worst place on Earth,
to us, anyway. I should have
told you about my nightly prophetic dreams in which you stormed into my
room, turned out my dresser, and found a dozen snake eggs, glistening with
humidity. Back then, I interpreted your shaky movements like a promise of less solitude,
fewer words to write during first wisps of dawns,
conversations I would plan ahead like I always
did. In one of those listless fantasies, you trembled alongside me
as we were watching something blaze in the distance, swallowing the horizon
as if a rotten licorice cane, glowing circular mouth gripping a black twig.
You asked me if I still breathed in prismic, neurotic patterns, if I still spent my evenings
translating candle flames, if I still drew snowy peaks on dirty roads from a place an ocean away.
I told you,
let me tell you about something that helps with living, and you listened,
and in that moment your body soaked in my air, unfiltered, for I had never opened my mouth,
for I had never needed to.
I live with the doubt that, perhaps,
I lived through that moment between us, that while I was away on a hill of a city - a place of a
family line I cannot trace - falling knee-deep in glistening white sierras, I swam into a chasm of
my own making and transformed you back
into a hissing mirage. I may have sanded your actions, rock solid, with my adolescent
need for a fantasy, and turned them into saccharine dust, something that I could gaze at, but
never touch, never dredge my tongue with.
If that is true, then I am justified in my state, in my continuous reenactment of an initial, painful
reaction to your indisputable existence, for I am but one of the many consequences to your luster,
an eye twitching after the trail of your blaze, one in a hidden shivering million of observers,
but one who lay next to you in the acid rain of mutual melancholia, one who knew you to be as I
am now -
someone who soaks, someone who helps with living,
someone who does not live without someone who helps with living.

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Masha Filipchenko (they/them) is a queer writer and filmmaker from Tomsk, Russia, currently working as a Production Coordinator in Washington, D.C.