Hold Your Breath

by Kyle Wright

My favorite part of films are always their beginnings. Soft calm before narrative frenzy. Pockets of everyday blooming within bulging impossible worlds. Its borders & endless possibilities. Before this moment my body inhabits blinks back thematically. A place that’s just tracing lines through calendar days. A place flipped from flickering to floating, lightness a breath we draw, almost forget the rattling & pipe knocking for a frame or two. Stabbing my face through boredom to kiss the space. To draw it in through my nose, feel pressure expand within chest cavity, gulp it down.

Living in the time to spend instead of for it. The brightness of the Shire as Gandolf rides in on his fireworks cart. There my heart truly lies, the peace, the quiet it begs me to whisper. i could follow the Fitzgerald sisters shoot ersatz murder scenes forever. Find that strange high school where everyone is too old, never grow up, & they live & die by their horror movie knowledge. Who wouldn’t want to follow Harriet as she sees & writes about everything? What’s the point if that isn’t my goal?

Life on the lam at the speed of a dreamy novel. If camping seaside & reading poetry & smoking comically large cigarettes is going Le Fou count me gone. i want to join in the pithy arguments between Burt & Earl, as they mend fences, rock-paper-scissoring over who makes breakfast. Before people get sucked into ground. Before i’d have to worry about being one of the creatures’ snacks—i’m no leading man, bad comic relief at best?

i want to make my home in seclusion on Antarctica, hunkering down with the researchers i see flicker on an old choppy tape. Before the shape-shifting & paranoia & flamethrowers. Those long months smeared into one tiny building, staying away from an outside that would gladly whisper my death. Smoking with that one token stoner character, his weirdly-rolled joints, focusing on my writing & all those books i haven’t had time to read yet. Watch all the shows i haven’t sped through in one long string of barely lingering moments. i wouldn’t even bother shaving or grooming, like MacReady with his mountain man beard. For narrative reasons, not because six million people are dead outside these walls.

Hide out from the stale moist air of this swollen moment i am breathing. i want a movie of only beginnings, live a story of only beginnings. To linger in longer.

cold air apartment steel steal breath between categories. Learn to live between catalogs. Thin spark smiling line probing fingers. i imagine old conversations trapped in the layers of dust & paint on the walls. Voices are translucent, glass filled with daylight, hard to separate where my ghost image blends with theirs’. Rough bits among smooth chaos. What delineates recognition & reanimation? What space, irreversible vacancy do i fill that i resist? What is this category i am told to take on that looks nothing like me? Flesh at the pace of page, pink streaks in night wind, augmented symbol of memory, or a real gulp of time & air?

Kyle Wright (he/him) is a Chicago-based writer, musician, and visual artist. He is the author of Videodrome (2018, Really Serious Lit Disappearing Chapbook Series) and the novella In Control (2021, Bizarro Pulp Press.) His work has appeared most recently in New Feathers Anthology, Derailleur Press and Defunkt Magazine. He has surfed couches across Europe, lived on a mountain in Colorado, worked as a wedding DJ, and sliced loaves of bread. He lives with his partner and their cat, Chickpea.