Cottonmouth

I’d never been a good sleeper, could never make it through the night without dedicating a solid few hours in broken succession to staring into the endless black void that was my room. In this way, I was always half conscious—wakeful and sleeping, then drowsy yet waking. For a while I'd found a way to settle it, lying beside you and letting our heartbeats synchronise. The warmth of a safe presence, a solid body, wrapped around me. I never slept better than I did in that short year we shared together, never was happier or more alive; even my mother would tell me what a restless sleeper I was as a child.

              But then suddenly you weren't there anymore, and abruptly did my body decide it should return to its default settings. The habit of existing in fragments and being unable to distinguish the real from the wholly imaginary reminded me of the life I was used to. My vision was hazy and half-formed as I sleepwalked through the day. I couldn’t be startled by the rogue sleep-deprived hallucinations, sneaking up on me like broken clockwork. I'd had them all—distorted shadow figures, killer clowns in my window, ghostly footsteps trailing me up and down the street. I had started seeing your face on bodies too where it didn't belong, feeling your hand on my cheek in the night when it was no longer possible for it to be.

              On one particular morning though, I found myself fixated on a sensation I’d never had before. I noticed, when staring into my reflection, a red thread hanging out from my mouth. This was new, too tame to keep to the same absurdity that my visions generally shared.

              Opening up my jaw, I saw the thread descend inside my gob and weave its way into my cheek, like a stitch come loose, or a tube embedded against my gums and slowly collecting blood. I tugged at the thread and, as threads are wont to do, it got marginally longer. It didn't hurt, didn't burn my needled cheek nor yank at anything deep inside me, it simply hung—now an inch in length—down against my chin.

              Between my teeth I held that string, sucking on it on the bus, rolling it against my peeling lips and feeling at its fraying cotton edge with my tongue. At work, I waited for someone to point it out, to ask about the material growing from inside me, or at the very least try to pull it from my face like my mother used to do with the sleep in my eyes, but no one even glanced its way. I pulled it a little longer, smiled and flossed it between my teeth mid-conversation, yet still it remained invisible to anyone but me. From that I was assured this was no more than another trick of the sleep-deprived brain. Something new to distract my mind, constantly on fire, from the thing I had lost with you.

              Like a hair I was eager to pull from my chin, I became obsessed, fiddling constantly with the fibre emerging from me. During dinner I pulled it longer, so I could tuck it behind my ear as I ate. Then, when watching TV, I pulled it longer still so I could tie my hair back with it. In the night I wound it around my fingers and tucked it under my nails, waking, as I did, to fidget with it some more. It seemed so real, but where could it have come from, this artificial piece of me? After all these years, I still couldn't convince my mind of what a hallucination was not—like dreaming or watching water boil, you can always be certain of what is real, but never sure of what isn't.

              By morning I had almost cocooned myself, the thread encircling me as if I was a moth in a spider’s web. I took a pair of scissors and cut myself free. Then, worried I may have spoiled the illusion, I checked my mouth; the thread still grew from me, and now I had a pile of open, red strung cotton kept in the corner of the room, fading as it spiralled onto the floor. The thread in my mouth had paled to a vibrant shade of orange.

              Throughout the day I fed it out of me, watching the gradient change. It was a splendid thing, the way it dissolved from orange to yellow, from blue to green, from violet to pink in a brilliant display. Inside me there seemed to be a tapestry unravelling. It filled my office space, and weighed me down as I moved to and fro.

              With my new appendage I played and experimented. I tied it to the light chain on my lamp at night so I could give it a quick tug and turn my light off without having to do a silly dance in the dark to find my way back to bed. I cut it in short spurts and wore bits like strings to keep track of my to-do list the way I used to do when I was a kid. I began to learn to cross-stitch, using my lonely nights and my endless string to gain a hobby and learn a craft.

              Sometimes at work I experimented with the limits of my thread's abilities, tying it thick and taut between desks at ankle height from the floor, trying to trip someone up. Instead they'd keep walking, releasing it from its inch-high game of limbo and dragging it along with them to their desks. When it tangled itself up like that, occasionally I'd loop the cord back the same way I tucked away a vacuum hose. Other times, I cut it clean from my mouth. It was surreal to see all the colours of twine stick to  my colleagues' clothes as if we had some communal washing pile where shirts and pants were being unwound and torn asunder.

              It was sick, the way it consumed me. My entire world became coloured and static, the way old TVs would sometimes malfunction and show those fractured horizontal lines on the screen, disturbing the image. If you were there I might’ve had something to grasp onto, a stretch of reality to anchor myself to.

              When my mum called, I tried to tell her about my defect, the string growing from my face.

              “I don’t know where it’s coming from. It grows from my face, and I can unwind it, like, the way you do when you’re sewing. It feels so real. I just, I can’t get myself to believe it isn’t there, you know? I can feel it, I can hold it,” I sounded manic, I thought. But I wasn’t, was I?

              She breathed out slow, hesitant, concerned.

              “I think you should try and get some help, darling,” she told me.

              She didn’t understand, but then again, neither did I. My body was foreign to me, a production line of thread descending into my veins and through the ventricles of my heart.

              Of course, she was right. I came to realise it in the resounding silence of my dingy apartment. I was so unbelievably empty, all except for my cotton mouth.

              Some weeks later, I made an appointment with my doctor, got a referral for a psychiatrist who knew of my strangeness and ways to solve it. The doctor was kind, comforting, unaware that when my fingers moved as if I was rocking an air keyboard or performing some invisible, amateur knitting, it was because there was an escape rope being weaved in my hands. I was ashamed, could only divulge so much as to say: “I’m obsessed with visions I know aren’t there.”

              Referral in hand, I walked out into the waiting room. There I was stopped by the sight of a person with long ginger hair and a familiar green handbag.

              I am sure I would recognise you anywhere, back to me or any other way. Yes, I was sure—across the room, though facing away from me, I was certain there was you. I felt my heart become harnessed in a tight grip, all of a sudden too fast and big and pulsing in pain. I was still, frozen. I watched you as you searched through your bag, losing something. You put your phone to the side as you waded through, grabbing your wallet and retrieving your bag again hurriedly. You left your phone there, and I wanted to yell out, or save you, or be someone who did something marginally important or at least made an appearance in your life. But I didn’t. I just watched as you disappeared down the hallway with a doctor, your phone still on the desk.

              With you now out of sight, I approached it. No one looked up, even noticing it’d been forgotten. I picked it up, first thinking I might read a notification from a new lover, or maybe just hold it for a moment to try to feel your warmth once more. Maybe I’d take it with me, I considered, having a piece of you to own again as mine. Instead I began unspooling the string from my mouth, a nervous habit or a bad idea. I took your phone, tying the thread in a knot around the device—square-knotted, real tight.

              I moved swiftly as soon as the idea came to me, clumsily, scared that you would catch me and I would have to say... something. I wouldn't have even known where to begin. I rushed away, down the hall, to the bathrooms, letting the string trail from my mouth and fall away behind me. Some distorted 'Hansel and Gretel' where the breadcrumbs were corns growing from their bare feet.

              When I recomposed myself, I tucked the referral into my pocket and walked casually out of the building. I knew some kind person would return your phone to you, and I couldn’t be convinced that it was anyone but you.

              With every second I walked, every metre the bus travelled, the string from my mouth pulled further out, burning my gums and my lips with the speed of it, but holding tight nonetheless. The string descended to reveal a rainbow rapidly unspooling. Quick, beautiful, only motion and colour and you.

              I refused to question what you’d be doing in a clinic on my side of town, or why your lock screen was of a family I’d never known, or when your complexion had so dramatically shifted, or when my perception could be so completely trusted. I didn’t care to know.

              That night I lay down to sleep, the string in my mouth passing through doors and windows; pulled taut and careful like a cat’s cradle. Turning onto my side, I grabbed the string between my fingers, giving it a gentle tug. I knew on the other side, was you. And for the first time since we’d been apart, and without the need for the doctor’s intervention, I slept soundly through the night.