She presses her stomach and forehead to the stone wall, part of a citadel dating back to 1099 AD.
Stone is cool with rot, smoked breast, and the nearby yellow aspen shivering on the river which may have, hundreds of years ago, belonged to someone doomed. She likes to imagine this: every inch of earth remembers suffering. A place of beauty—autumn reflected in water—belongs to the person who has found it. A moment that contrasts or harvests their sense of falling. This, a kind of fate.
On the first night at the rustic B&B, she dreamt that she could run fast enough that her eyelids peeled back. When she awoke in the morning, disoriented by the new time zone, she was comforted by the illusion that in her dreams she’d been physically active to the point where breathing felt new. Last night, she had dreamt of over-eating, violet flesh, her bones braiding as they broke. Images culminating in blood, just the vision of blood. She’s always wanted to understand why survival must be the opposite of dying.
Her bones feel challenged against something very old. The fortress beading a muscular cliff, masthead to a blue valley. And those yellow aspens, ancient forest striated in water. The Falconry Hour will start in five minutes. She’ll watch falcons and snow owls fly from tower tips over to a man dressed in garb from the millennia’s start, holding chunks of pink meat.
The jet lag is terrible—she’s hungry and she’s not, out of time and is not. Her stomach lifts and twists like she’s falling. Richly layered: the compression in her head, the old walls, the stories she tells herself, consuming what has already happened. And she heaves as if peeling back her throat, and vomits inside the castle.
Seasonal disorder. Low-functioner. Plummetless. What is the condition called when every inch of the earth feels capped beneath your feet? The journey here was a high arc across the planet. She’s seen the sun for what it is: a feast, predictable, and inhumane.

october 28th, 2020