Claustrophobia

A Poem by Astari My-Roof

Walking along one day, the world felt really small for some reason. So I wrote a passage about it. Any critique?

I can make the world small. Shrink it down to a tee. Take the endless soup of it and press it into a little disembodied globe, only as big as my mind. I can appoint the sky my ceiling and the ground my scoured floor. Then fill the gaps with a spin along the horizon; furnished with whatever is caught in the sweep of my eyes. I cement the roof there, my vault of blaring blue, to the edges, with thought stronger than adhesive. Sturdier than any belief and more seamless. The edge bites into my vision; I take it about me, drawn it in, close and snug, like the loop of a noose. It embraces me here, in the middle and, inevitably, comes to encompass me. My little globe, my little world; my terrible stifling hug.

Forgetfulness seals the cracks; the leaks, incessantly streaming from the unseen. Drips that whisper of things behind and things beyond and grasses which may or may not be greener. I stop the flow; let oblivion expand, become as infinite as a faraway sigh. I let it scour the outside of the dome, scraping the unknown off the borders, like butter off toast. “There” becomes “here”, “here” becomes everything. And what isn’t becomes nothing.

But the nothing weighs more than anything ever will, and so it pushes. From the ends of the world, it pushes relentlessly from all sides. It squeezes and my world can’t help but submit; so it shrinks, again. Smaller and smaller; the sky falls, until it presses down on to me, hanging too low to stand. Far away becomes too close, the horizon jabs at my sides; from an embrace to a tomb. Suddenly, the air seems too little, or me too much. I gasp and tremble and shout. And yet, it shrinks further still. The nothing keeps pushing; till my limbs crumble into body, till my body’s compressed into my skull, till my skull too dissolves into my mindless panic. When the world is nothing but the frantic space of my thoughts and an endless unsounding scream, the globe breaks. And then shatters.

I take a breath.