"Twirling around with this familiar parable - spinning, weaving 'round each new experience." - TOOL, 'Parabola'
#shrinking #gts #softvore #bodyexploration
*****
You find yourself awake mid-breath on the perfect wilderness night. When waking up in a strange city, in a strange bed, or on strange earth, you get to experience your senses one at a time, instead of in tandem as normally. Serenity hits you first, a gentle balance of crisp wind against the heat trapped in your sleeping bag. Ursa Major and Minor are shining above you, unmarred by any haze of city lights. Rogue scents mingle: mountain flowers, loam and camphor, sage; your own musk over another human's, spicy and natural-sweet. Even the clamor of insects scratching and chirping incessantly in the brush doesn't unsettle you: you are as still as you can be, breathing your surroundings in deeply.
Eventually, though, the hazy memories of hiking and camping come back to you clearly, and despite the darkness and perfection of the night, you realize that you are fully awake. You rub the sleep out of your eyes and turn, meaning to slide your naked body out of the sleeping bag and into the cool world (perhaps brush your teeth, wake your sleeping companion and convince her to go on a waterfall dive)- and instead, your perception is suddenly assaulted by incomprehensible images: dirt as far as the eye can see, craters impacting the landscape everywhere, massive Martian vegetation shifting shadows around you, towering impossibly-
Tilt-shift. This is not the world that you fell asleep in. Almost seasick, your hands cling to the massive clods of soil around you, and you weather the lung-wrecking panic that engulfs you. You close your eyes.
Cicadas. Rustling leaves. Patchouli. Intimate musk.
After a few moments, your sense of self-control equalizes and smoothes out the shock, and your natural sense of curiosity opens your eyes. You find yourself whispering to the night.
"Holy fucking...shit." A place too real and strange to even have the dream-quality some moments have. You can feel the world interacting with itself, below your feet and out and on forever. There is a tiny, dim light flickering in the tent that rises next to you like the Manhattan cityscape: a soft haze, jutting out and out and making you lean back to understand it's enormity- you can't even fathom the trees.
For the second time in your life that you can remember, your heartbeat is the smallest thing that you've ever experienced. This simple terrestrial growth humbles you, making you deeply aware of your own fragile humanity. You are, you imagine, just above a half-inch from the ground- and your capacity for terror is gone. You are a being made of cells and awe, standing naked in the newborn dawn.
Possibilities for exploration immediately flood your mind. The ordinary things that surround you are suddenly extraordinary, filled with new context. The dirt clods around you are made of massive, palm-sized grains, and with effort, you can squeeze dew from them in droplets the size of your face. Something about this is thrilling: without much forethought, you begin packing the dirt into something between a shack and a doghouse, with a roof that meets just above your shoulderblades. It stands proudly and smoothly. It requires true effort to uproot the leaves of grass that you mean to weave together as a covering for your mud-house: you give up after three, realizing the futility of it, and your dwelling as a whole. But still, you marvel at them: they are wondrously tough and thick, yet transparent enough for you to admire their vein structure, with capillaries thicker than your own.
You imagine that they heaved soft sighs, when you uprooted them from the ground, and you lay them respectfully back before heading toward the tent. Morning is rising, but the air is still somewhat cold, and even close to the ground, its circulation chills the thin sheen of sweat on your naked and slightly mud-covered body. The tent means shelter, an absolute necessity when living in the elements. Why you have awoken outside of it is not the solvable half of this mystery: merely an observation that you puzzle over.
The corner of the tent is already unzipped and pulled aside (several real-world inches at the very least-who does that? who wants bugs in their tent?) but you have to jump and grab onto the edge of the vinyl lip to reach the opening. Your miniscule weight shifts the material, and flops you roughly inside.
You roll from the barely-covered ground to something blissfully soft and warm against your bare skin, and you can't resist turning to give it further inspection and appreciation. Smooth as velvet, the color of rich honey in the dim light of the tent, and vast as a zeppelin- a girl's round shoulder peeks out from under a tangled mass of brown silk sheets. You climb her, mesmerized, your bare feet sinking ever-so-slightly into the surface of her skin. Her sleep-breaths come heavy and slow, and she shifts as you climb across her chest, pulling the sheets down for air.