Collapsible, flat

What started it? What word, what silence? What look, or what blindness? Where there were once the smooth contours of bodies, the cool or warm shock of flesh, a story nestled in the the places where skin met; where there were once beautiful structures built out of nothing except the timidity of our first words; where there were once memories that were as alive as the moment they were lived; there is now only this. A strange metamorphosis gripped us. I felt myself box-like under your gaze, made out of card. A card face and card hands, card chest and card arms, a foldable heart and a hole for a mouth that could not even say your name. If at one time we felt our bodies bionic, electric with what we could be, the air had now left us; our lungs had become paper, shredded and pulped, compressed in a factory. And now they collapsed. We stared at each other from out of our flat, incapable eyes and swayed in a draft as something we once were stood up and left us. We toppled over; we lay flat, good for nothing except to be flatpacked. Then a collagist snuck in under cover of night and snipped at us and sliced until all that was left were these pieces – one-dimensional, oblique, in complete disarray – hinting at things that had once made us but which would now disintegrate and fade.