(007)

You are quieter here.

Away from the sounds and the lights and the way your tongue never stopped to think that maybe, this would be the last thing it knew.

You want to call the trees home and live in them until the snow falls and weighs too heavy on your head.

But the last thing you knew was my tongue, my fingers, light, over your neck and the heat of a day too cold for summer

It’s the best we could do.

The light bulb blew

And for a few seconds, like the sun, we knew nothing of the approaching disaster

Of the fire and cold, the ice that won’t form now that the chasm of torturous heat at the centre of our room, your chest, is gone.

The trees remain silent as men watch the stars for a sign that God is not real,

Hoping he’ll tell them himself, so they can turn their backs on the sun 

And live like mushrooms in the dark.

(006)

I think I may have inhaled you at some point in the past, but somewhere between the endless rumble of the cars pushing the street deeper and deeper into the earth and the sighing of the sky as it holds its breath and exhales, changing colours as his lungs change shape with the day, I must have breathed in another, or maybe more. Sometimes it feels as if I have breathed in the entire world, in one breath or many, I try to hold them all in my chest as if keeping them there could keep us from harm.

(005)

‘There is too much between us.”

There are seas and days and distances across time that only light knows, there are too many paths that our selves will never take. The distance is too far, too far to see or hear or drink or swim or dream. And when we have reached the edge of what we know, we look out into the distance and see only unknown.

“I wish I could say that I know you too well.”

But not enough.

Even as the warmth of our hands change each particle in the universe, the motions of our hearts send stars into motion. Even as the wind moves and the stars shine and all that we once though was certain will eventually fade; the ways that I knew all the pathways across your skin; the colour of your blood as it drips from a cut finger; every memory of you will fall like rain into nothingness, lost amongst all the nothing that every person has ever known.

But still, nothing is never enough.

(004)

There was once a time for me when the words of each book become no longer the testimony of the author, a prose agonized over and laboriously tended to- but the same words, written over and over, pages filled with different structure, intonation and verse declaring the same thing again and once more. The same words filling each page, each chapter whispered my secret as though each tree and sunrise was because I love you, each laugh was the explosion of myself to you. 'I love you', as if the world was as in love as I, as if each page, and the ink from which these words were made of were all declarations of my love. That's how it was. For three years I read many books: hundreds, even, but saw none of it. All the words were replaced with you. When I left it was as if a floodgate had opened, and all the pain that your love had blinded me from came crashing in. Your love struck me again and again, drowning me in my own ignorance as you continued your own inscience elsewhere.

(003)

Recently, I’ve been searching for meaning, a rhythm to which my weary heart is meant to beat to, but all I’ve found is empty rooms, syncopated with all the echoes of a life I’m not sure I’ve ever understood. Like looking into a stranger’s house, I try to find reason, a method and causation to explain why I, unlike my neighbours, bleed not with blood but words.

So I search and I search for the reason and rhyme but I’m coming up short. The kind of short that sends you to bed before the others, rubbing your eyes with the frustration of not keeping up; that sits you at the kids table and keeps you always looking up, up, up at all the faces who speak of things I’ll never fully understand. They say youth is a chalice waiting to be filled by emotion but I feel more like a plateau each day, each feeling and thought pouring off my edges like the waters of a world not yet round and I’m wondering if it will always be this way.

And every now and then, when the moon grows too dark and too far away, I stop. I stop and I wonder if what I’m doing will do anything, if my scribbling will bring more change than change the weight of the change I carry in my pocket and most days, I honestly don’t know.

There was once a time when I could have written the ten things I know to be true, and I would have believed them. Now I’m not so sure.

So I read. I read and I read and I wait for something to reach out and grab me by the throat, but all I feel is a tingling in my toes, and I’m sure that’s more to do with bad circulation and tight socks than the need to pack up and go.

And twelve months ago I could have given everything away to any boy with a pretty smile and a cheesy sense of humour, but the winter wasn’t kind this year and I’m left more hollow than before, dodging around the bad metaphors and allegories that will carve me out like a Halloween pumpkin if I let them. (And at times I’m sure they’ve gotten to me, when the weight of the world feels like the badly written words of an apathetic youth who knows little more than the cost of a three section bus ticket and a bag of chick-peas, who waxes poetical over all the lost love I’ve never actually had when in truth, I’ve only ever loved my cat).

And this isn’t a complaint. Except the only thing I know to be true is that I know nothing of what I once did, and nothing of what I could, and everything is made of the same nothing that I keep bumping my head against and it sends those blasted stars from long ago into my eyes to blind me with all the nothing that the light has travelled through, and I rub and I rub to try and get them out but nothing I do works like it used to because my fingers are made of more nothing than something and I’m passing through walls like the living pass through doorways and sooner or later the ones with the brains and the talent are going to pick me up and send me to bed.

I need to breathe.

I’m not Atlas, but sometimes, (night-times, times when I’ve had too much sugar, 5.30am morning-times), I think I can be. When something in the air catches in my lungs I almost feel that I could carry the world on my back, or in my hands, but I’m still not sure if I can be responsible to hold that much.  My hands are still too small, my life is still too short, my shoes are still too worn. And even when I feel as old as the world and all my past lives are creeping out through my skin, I still struggle to understand the ways in which gravity keeps me together.

I want to be bold enough to be weak, and I think I am almost weak enough to be bold. I have nothing left to prove to anyone but myself and I hope that that won’t change but these things always do. But I’ll keep searching, looking for the reasons why I breathe this staggered prose like dragons breathe smoke and dig until I’m just short of reaching the fire in my belly. Maybe then I will know. But until then I’ll keep hiding under tables and searching dust in these empty rooms to make rhythm out of this thing we call a heartbeat.

(002)

Bury me. Like that letter I gave you three years ago, in the tin that your grandmother once carried, containing everything in the world that mattered to her. I want to be the only thing that matters when the house we once called home burns to the ground. I want to be the fire that devours your heart and I want to be the balm you use to soothe the pain.

I want to be the letter you leave your daughter in her lunchbox that says that I hope you do not hurt, and I want to be the monster that drives it all away. I want to live in the cracks in the pavement that you still skip when you walk to work, and I want to be the skip in your step as you feel the first sun of springtime on your neck.

I want mine to be the neck you kiss goodnight to, the night that wraps around you like a dark blanket, and I want to be the morning that awakes to greet you.

When you look up at the sky shining through the atmosphere, I want to be the light from the stars that has travelled billions of years to dance with your eyes. I want to be the space between letters, the silence between words. I want to be the air you inhale and music you exhale when you sing in the shower. I want to hold yourself in the box of myself, like the tin that holds the only thing that matters to me: you.

The Tropic of Cancer

For a long time, scientists had puzzled over the ways in which elephants communicate. E.S.P. was suggested as a reasonable mode of communication: the only plausible way in which these majestic animals could possibly communicate so silently over long distances. Of course, when these learned men and women found the truth, E.S.P. seemed not only ridiculous but more along the lines of thought that men of old used to suggest that the earth was flat and all else revolved around it. At the time, however, E.S.P. appeared to be logical, as who really can understand the mysterious instinct of animals with their assumed sub-par intelligence. As time progressed, however, the idea of a lesser intelligence designated for animals faltered as men found that sparrows are finely tuned to the gravitational patterns of the planet; and in the same line found that the elephants had not been communicating through E.S.P. but through sound frequencies too low for the human ear to pick up.

Like elephants, the mountains also have long been communicating through this low rumble for millions of years. Across the great expanses of ocean and land, mountains have been rumbling, grounded by the weight of all the words they are made to pass on.

Suppose this method of communicating: that of echoes and travelling sound was not merely something for elephants and mountains and the bigger creatures of the world. Suppose then that our early ancestors also communicated through the calling out of ones feelings, as we emulate now through our own open mouths.  Sound, being both a means and a signal gives us the one tool that we can use to share with another being the thoughts that we ourselves have. Like mountains and elephants, we too transmit our thoughts through echoes and resonances.

Consider this: Dr. José Ganéa is no longer doctor, but hunter. The flesh that he will one day come to repair is atonement for the flesh that sharpened stone and spear now tears. José, although he knows that his own self is not the self of another, has no name, for names can only mean something if there is someone to designate meaning. Therefore, José, being far closer to being José than the man next to him, is still further from being José than he will ever be again. For now, he is Hurghk. Hurghk faces the same challenge that each of his descendants will face: he sees in his view an attractive woman. For all his lives of ripping apart and sewing together flesh, the most human and animal of qualities, Hurghk knows nothing of how to show this woman what he wants: that being herself.

This woman is Anaïs Gentileschi, but far removed from the Anaïs that at sixteen gave herself away to the most alluring, Anaïs at this present moment is hardened, a strong woman who wholly deserves the term ‘woman’ in a way that each generation values for its meaning in the same primordial sense. Anaïs, like José, will not yet know the name of Anaïs. Now, Anaïs is Ayglk. Ayglk is a hunter as much as Hurghk, her long fingers are strong and her eyes are fierce.

It could be Ayglk’s fierce eyes that call Hurghk to her, or it could be the shape of her legs, the length of her fingers, or the resonance of her voice. However, this connection could also go back much further, to a time where Anaïs and José meet for the umpteenth first time in a park outside a laboratory, a time where the moon and the ocean first fall in love, a time where two particles meet to make the first hydrogen atom.

In this age, Hurghk follows instinctually what all men have done since the beginning. He begins to woo Ayglk, at first with his own merits, a transaction for her attention not shared with any other. Once gained, Hurghk, like José will not stop. He finds the branches that burn the longest; he finds the sweetest smelling things; the brightest, most colourful objects. He carves for her ornate stones, for her and the rest of humanity to admire. He brings to her the best foods; paints for her the vivid portraits of the world he wants to give her, the world that men will admire for millennia as a mark of each persons history. But before it belonged to anyone else, this history belonged to just two.

As soon as Hurghk had won Ayglk’s devotion, he found once more a chasm separating them from becoming like the atom. Gesture, the first means of communication was falling short of everything Hurghk wished to say. In the same way, Ayglk found that silence, the great carrier of emotion was grossly inadequate. Together, they began to search with their hands and ears and eyes for the ways in which to tell another the things that only you may know.

Years may have passed, but perhaps it was days, or hours or centuries before they found the first seeds of conversation in the most primitive cries: sound that escaped one’s mouth when one felt too much.

Perhaps it was in one’s sleep that these first cries were found, or maybe it was the sound of the heart breaking through ones mouth as they observed the thing they cared most about being destroyed. Whatever it may have been, the first sound our ancestors made would have been weighted down with all the feeling of every being who had ever lived. And then it began. The first word to be spoken was ‘love’. For a time people would walk around pointing to the things they felt most strongly about, announcing ‘love’ as their name. Soon the world was filled with men and women naming love to the things that made them feel.

‘You’ was the next word, to give meaning to the things that were not themself. ‘You’, you are not I. You are separate from me, but you are now you, and valid because of that. The next words to follow were ‘Fire’, ‘Food’, ‘Look’, ‘Mother’, ‘Father’ and ‘Child’.  ‘Goodbye’ was said when the first person had to leave, ‘Hello’ was said as they came back. ‘Beautiful’ was said after ‘Why’, just as ‘Sorry’ followed ‘Hurt’. ‘Everything’ followed ‘Nothing’, which birthed ‘Make’, ‘treasure’ and ‘Destroy’. The last few words were ‘Them’, ‘Us’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ was one of the last words to be said, and only came about because men and women found that the names they gave things also gave weight, a reason to hold each object to itself, and the heavier other things became, the lighter they themselves felt. Thus, ‘I’ only came to ground each individual to the ground, and now ‘I’, the heaviest word of all, sinks people deeper than ever.

At this time, men still spoke with their hands as well as their mouth. They felt as though the words that they spoke could still be fallible, that some things may not be understood. Ayglk could be standing next to the flames cooking the meat and Hurghk may say ‘love’. For all Ayglk knows, Hurghk could be pointing to the flames, the bringer of heat and light, or the meat which would keep him alive, both of which seem a more likely object of his love than her, a desire yet no more necessary for his survival than the paintings on the wall. Without Hurghk pointing at her, Ayglk may never realise that each time Hurghk announces ‘love’, he is announcing her name, and thus naming all that he feels most strongly about as a testament to her.

Suppose then, that this was the birth of the spoken word. In the days of our ancestors, communication was valued for more than mere conversation. In the age of stone, of fire and of cave walls and gesture, the ability to use ones mouth, to shape and mould the sound as a sculptor does his clay, was of an importance that we fail to understand now. In a time where men spoke as mountains, the ability to say things was easily shared. The things that one man would shout would be echoed by all those who heard it.

Thus, if a man: Hurghk was to go away hunting and miss the chance to say something to his love: Ayglk, he could simply yell out  ‘I love you’, and know with all certainty that it would reach her ears. But just as ‘I love you’ would reach her ears, it would reach many others. As one man shouts his love, all who hear it would repeat it, each man standing as a mountain from which the sound would bounce off. Soon, a whole expanse of land could be covered with the echoes of ‘I love you’, and each who heard it would feel as if it was especially for them, and lock a piece of it away in their hearts before echoing it onwards.

In the days of mountains, men understood the importance of things said in the same way that they understood the importance of stone weaponry and the importance of art. In an age of telephones, of daily newspapers and disposable love, we seem to have forgotten the significance of permanence. Like the cave paintings and weapons of our ancestors, the words that they once shouted over savannah and plain still reverberate to this day in the hearts of mountains, still echo in the rumbling of elephants.

(001)

I once told my brother I was a herbivore. It feels more right than saying I can’t eat the flesh of something that once lived. He said it sounded like I could be a dinosaur. I said I was a dragon in another life and he agreed. I didn’t tell him that my skin burns with all the lives that could have been, and my stomach aches with the hollow echo of loss.

At night when I call out in my sleep it is like all my past lives are trying to live through me once more. My room holds the choirs of everywhere I’ve ever been and when I wake up, my presence makes it empty. I walk through the empty rooms I’ve wrapped myself with and I wonder if every life has been this way, and one day I’ll be crying out through my sleeping mouth at myself as a king, or an elephant, begging them: this time, please live.

My mother tells me that I stay up too late and rise too early. I asked her if she knew the feeling of drifting off to sleep and jolting awake with the feeling of falling. She said yes and I told her that this was nothing like that. The reasons why people can never sleep are never the same, yet everyone in the world knows them intimately.

Sometimes I feel so much that my fingertips burn. They say that the solar corona around the sun can reach millions of degrees higher than the surface. I feel that if I let them, my hands could get that hot. And one day, I will have to put a sign around my neck, saying “please, don’t touch me” because I’ll be too afraid to burn anyone. And even the notes that I put into my children’s lunch-boxes, saying “I hope you do not hurt” will be singed around the edges.

I cry so much these days that I’ve stopped noticing. I could be looking at the sky or talking to a friend and someone will ask me why I have tears streaming down my face, to which I must truthfully answer, ‘I don’t know.’ Sometimes I think it’s just because life is too beautiful, but then I look at all the scars people carve into the forests of our lives and wonder if it really is.

Anaïs Gentileschi.

On the day when Anaïs Gentileschi was born, her father looked into her face and saw that it was full of stars. He held her in his arms as her mother drew her last breaths, and he promised he would do anything so she would not hurt.

Although Anaïs never quite realised it, her father did the best job at this that he knew how. But no matter how well a father can act out his good intentions, there comes an age, usually around the adolescent period, that a girl begins to notice the attention of boys, and will willingly give the parts of herself away that will hurt the most when she misses them.

Anaïs was sixteen when she met her first suitor. Although she had had flings with the other boys at her school, she chose to keep this affair a secret from her father, mainly because it was exactly that: an affair. The man in question was a thirty-nine year old mathematics professor at the local university. Married to a sweet, unassuming woman, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi had become increasingly bored with his lot in life, and had taken to exploring other avenues. As a mathematician and a man, he found it reasonably easy to show a sufficient amount of affection to convince Anaïs of his interest, yet could remain clinical enough to not arouse suspicion at home.

As a sixteen year old girl is still on the cusp of girlhood, Anaïs knew no better than the truths that Eduardo Malchensi told her. She offered up the softest shapes of hers in a sickly transaction for his shallow affection, and Eduardo received them. He taught her of the shapes a man and a woman can make between themselves and the sky, and she in turn learnt of the ease in which these shapes can be forged and torn down by the power of ones mind. Eventually, Anaïs learned the power of intimacy in breaking down a man, and Prof. Eduardo Malchensi discovered the intense shapes that love can form within ones ribs.

I would like to tell you that this relationship was discovered, that Anaïs’ father found out and demanded that Prof. Eduardo Malchensi take heed of his despicable actions and leave. I would even have pleasure in telling you that Eduardo’s wife found that she was with child, and with that stroke of reality, he pushed himself back into a respectable lifestyle. However, this did not happen. Luckily for the decreasing moral standards of those involved, youth played it’s last and strongest card: boredom.

Anaïs was now seventeen. For her birthday Prof. Eduardo Malchensi had showered her with gifts that, though well-meaning, reflected very much his age. What use Anaïs had for silk stockings and perfume when the shapes of herself were still too young to fully appreciate them. Instead of reading these communicable gifts as the shape of Eduardo’s burgeoning love for her, she found them clinical, functional over sentimental, and most of all, boring. Two weeks later, she found a boy her own age. And, as the cheater becomes cheated on, Anaïs found herself in a more suitable relationship of love-notes, coy glances and other youthful tendencies that two young teenagers should experience in their first clumsy relationships.

However much blinded by his love for Anaïs, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi still had eyes enough to see that the lines between himself and Anaïs were becoming weaker. In the evenings when he managed to procure time for them both, he found her increasingly distant. As he kissed her neck, she would stare out the window, or at the clock, or begin to bite the nail on her left thumb. On evening, irritated by her faded passion, he confronted her. Obviously, he wanted to know the truth, and he demanded it of her, standing over her bare legs as she looked dreamily out the window.

‘Well, what do you want to know, Eduardo?’ Anaïs mumbled, still looking away.

‘I want to know what is wrong with you’ Eduardo spat, his face becoming redder and redder at the fact that she still hadn’t looked at him.

‘Oh, many things I suppose. Mrs. Alendra says I don’t concentrate enough. My father says I’m too unfocussed. Gabriel says my socks are always unclean.’

‘Gabriel? Who is Gabriel?’ Eduardo hissed.

‘Oh, a boy.’

‘A boy. Ho! Since when did you talk to boys?’

‘Since when did you become my father?’ Anaïs demanded, standing up and staring into his face. “If I wanted questions I’d simply go home, and you know that.’

With these words, Prof. Eduardo Malchensi realised what Anaïs had been telling him for weeks, not with words but with the muted shapes of her body language, with the distracted lines that rarely connected with his. Seized with a desperate mans panic, he began to clamour towards her.

‘What is it Anaïs? What can I do? Is it my wife? I’ll leave her in an instant if you want me to.’

With this show of desperation, Anaïs found that she was disgusted by this ageing man and his grovelling, dishevelled appearance.

‘You, leave your wife?’ she hissed. ‘How dare you. How dare you think that your child should go without a parent. You make me sick. You have always made me sick.’ and she turned to gather all her things.

Eduardo was shocked, but remained silent. What more could he do, as her trail of clothes followed her out the door. In that second, he felt the pathway before him split as abruptly as once slices a vegetable in half. On one side, he would chase Anaïs. He would bombard her with gifts, he would leave his wife, he would woo her father. He would take the dishonourable road. On the other side, he would let her be. If he meant as much to her as he assumed, she would return. He would not leave his wife, her father would remain ignorant. This too was a cowardly route, but the one he much preferred to take. All that this decision balanced on was the fact that he was sure that Anaïs would not be able to live without him.

He was wrong.

The affair lasted eight months, the longest relationship Anaïs had ever had, but enough for her to guard what shapes she knew her body could make. She had seen that men were pathetic, were weak and were not in any way interesting, and therefore were not anything that she desired to have present in her own life. She lived on.

With the desire for male affection numbed, Anaïs grew into an intelligent woman. She felt no need to focus on her appearance, her mind was what mattered most. She began to study the sort of things that enlightened her. She saw the shaped that exist between atoms, the lines brawn between matter and non-matter. She studied the stars, drawing lines between constellations as the boys in her class drew lines between her freckles. At the end of her degree, she moved out of her fathers house for an apartment at the old Hotel de Palais. He had wanted her to move in with others, a friend or a colleague or someone, but she would have none of that. She was perfectly content on her own. Life had taught her enough to not want anything to do with other people.

Every now and then, she would notice men looking at her with a sort of curious look. It was in no way the sort of look that Eduardo would give her, nor was it the coy timidity of Gabriel. As she could not place it, she disregarded it as unimportant, and focussed her mind on more important matters. And although sometimes this strange look was accompanied by a blushing man asking for a date, she always declined, with no exceptions. After years of turning the few men who asked her down, she had grown to twenty-four before she finally gave in.

When Dr. José Ganéa finally found the courage to ask Anaïs Gentileschi on the date he had been planning for two months, she gave in. She did not tell him that this was not something that she did not do, nor did she tell him anything about herself. She simply said yes, and to pick her up from the old Hotel de Palais as 7pm tomorrow evening. That, she felt, was enough of her biography for now.

Dr. José Ganéa.

At twenty-six, the young scientist Dr. José Ganéa found love for the first time. He found it as one finds the loose coins in one’s pocket, or else like a note fallen on the street. It was the time of the year when it was becoming warmer, he was sitting in the square outside the scientific research laboratories he had recently been employed at when he saw her. She was sitting across from him, legs crossed at the ankles, reading. She was wearing a yellow dress, as yellow as the sun on a summer day, and her hair, though loosely pulled back was fluttering over her face. José thought to himself that he had never seen her before, or else she was someone that he saw everyday, but familiarity had made her invisible to him. Whichever it was, he felt that he had finally found his way home.

As he sat thinking of all this, the girl looked at her watch, folded the corner of her page, and stood up to leave. At this point of time, José had two options. The first was to chase after her, ask her name and see if she would like to go on a date with him. He would find out that she was rather flattered, and would like to be picked up from the old Hotel de Palais at 7pm tomorrow evening. The second option, of course, is that of the cowards way. He would hesitate a few seconds too long, and even if he did finally leave his seat to chase after her, it would be too late. At 7pm tomorrow evening, he would be eating alone.

Unfortunately for Dr. José Ganéa, prolonged years of a studious lifestyle and minimal interaction with others had left him as a coward. Thus, at 7pm the next evening, Dr. José was eating alone, lamenting what could have been. For the next few days, he kept watch for the girl with the yellow dress. Occasionally he saw her, but found that he was still too timid to approach. After three weeks, he found courage enough to sit on the same park bench as her. Such a glorious conquest in his eyes, he did not notice for his own elation the three glances she sneaked at him, nor the way she seemed to be awkwardly curious, like one who is out of practice at something, yet is still attempting to do it.

In a way, without realising, Dr. José was forming silent shapes with this girl. Without words, the particles of himself had begun to reach out for hers, and with an unconscious surprise on both sides, hers began to reach back. Primitive shapes though lines are, this silent act of geometry was enough to form a kindredness between them, of which was completely unexpected. One would not be frowned upon for suggesting that perhaps the reason which Dr. José Ganéa finally found the courage to speak to this girl was indeed because of the geometry their bodes had unconsciously formed.

Of course, nothing about geometry was mentioned, merely the common conversations of two strangers who wish to un-become so. And although the unconscious shapes that each had formed around the fingers and knees and ears of the other, it did nothing to ease the uncomfortable silences made when a person such as Dr. José, who had spent too many years becoming familiar with the matter under a microscope discovers the mistake of having devoted very little time to familiarizing himself with women. This in itself would not have been a problem, and indeed, he wasn’t completely isolated from women. He worked with females: the almost completely asexual bland sort, constantly found in the laboratories, with frizzy hair and a stunned stare when forced to look elsewhere other than the complex life in their microbial experiments; he spoke with his mother and two sisters weekly; and he occasionally gave the girl who worked at the café a small smile. But although Dr. José had been around females all his life, few could truly say they have been deprived of this experience completely, he had never really encountered one of this sort: a woman.

There was something different about this woman compared to the rest of the females Dr. José had encountered. Instead of being a somewhat smaller version of a man, who sometimes wore skirts and snapped at you when the moon came too close, he found this woman to be softer, almost as if fuller and more tightly pulled together and so entirely complex in construction that he found himself wanting to trace his fingers over her skin to find where the joins could be, but being almost too afraid to breathe near her for fear something terrible and too big to understand may happen. She seemed almost entirely made-up yet more real than any female he had ever encountered before, the sort of powerful sense of awe you get when looking at a mountain or the sea for the first time, she was a sort of natural wonder and Dr. José Ganéa wanted to capture it all at once.

And it was this realisation that pulled the breath out of Dr. José’s lungs and made him stammer and blush each time he looked directly at her eyes. Or maybe he simply felt all this inside in one of those out-of-body experiences where you feel everything and nothing all in the same moment as you continue acting like a normal human being while you feel like this, this is what it must have been like at the beginning of the universe, this everything and nothing is enough to make anyone explode.

Geometry

In the beginning: the point of nothingness in which dwelt everything that could ever be, there too dwelt the capability for birth. The first birth was in essence, a birthing itself – a birthing of the first thing that could ever be: an origin. Then came the birth of geometry. Since the multiplication of singular matter into plurality, a connection has existed; a moment existing from thereon and continuing, multiplying at the same speed as the multiplication of matter. Since the first moment of connecting two points to make the first primitive shape: a line, this process has perpetuated in the same manner. Lines connect to other lines to make a form, that form gives meaning in a motion that all life has since striven to replicate. Thus, with the elegant expansion: the graceful birth of origin and all other matter, came the very first means to comprehending anything.

For millions of years, this means of comprehension went unnoticed by most matter. Each particle was adrift inside their own existence, and because matter was so very far apart, although each singularity was connected to another by lines, these lines were very rarely significant due to the space between them, thus shapes did not have much meaning. As the universe cooled with the growing space between particles, some matter began to understand the importance of geometry in regards to themselves, and naturally began to reach the particles of themselves out to the particles of another. This web of geometry, the interconnected particles that formed the universe, formed gravity in its primordial state through movement.

As this gravity grew, the lines between certain particles shortened, resulting in the formation of complex shapes, giving birth to complex matter. Thus, geometry birthed the meaning of substance. Substance which, for billions of years became dynamic, forming within each group of matter its own individual shapes that would eventually reach their lines to another group of matter, forming increasingly complex geometry in order to simulate perpetually the first conjunction between singularities to make something else. As a perpetuating process, the origins of life and all other matter are, at the basic level, a matter of geometry. We can observe in our universe the largely significant role geometry gives to shapes, matter and form.

Consider this in practice. As plants, we draw our lines to bring us closer to the sun. As birds, we sweep our obliques across the atmosphere, leaving an infinite array of shadows, forming patterns where our selves once filled. As fish, we dart from point to point in our underwater battle to escape forever the barrelling thunder of our sphere as predator; and as mountains, we hold our forms in seemingly steadfast solidarity, heaving and sighing with the movement of our shape.

As humans, we too replicate this first act of geometry. From the first birth of ourselves, the line drawn between singularity and multiplicity lies at the heart of our own complexity. We find shapes in the negative spaces, between limbs and fingers and heartbeats. At the birth of sight, we learn to trace lines between visible matter to the eye, from the eye to the cortex, the cortex to the receptor and then to the brain. Without knowing, we birth with our eyes the perception of geometry in our strangely centralised existence of consciousness.

As our shapes race towards life, we learn that geometry is at the heart of everything. Like the Christ of our childhood, planets hold their circular haloes of light on their poles, the arcs of light forming the most graceful shape nature knows. Our ribs form cages to keep safe the malleable shapes that keep us alive. The lines on heart-rate monitors give value to our life insofar as they remain the proof that we exist, just as the lines that form walls that when joined with collision strives to remove such proof. We learn that the spheres between people extend far beyond bodily interaction.

From the birth of comprehension of another’s being, lines between the points that make up ourselves begin to stretch to connect to the lines that form another. The young shapes we make are, at best, primitive, but it nevertheless gives value to the understanding of one outside our own consciousness. This form of geometry, the stretching to fill negative space of another with our own shapes is called love.

We learn love as children. The lines between parent and child reach further than the skin. Like ropes, they tie themselves around the small shape of a young heart. We trace the perforated lines that terrible love pricks into adolescent skin, and we find ourselves afraid, for the first time at twenty, of the danger that love and its corresponding geometry can bring. 

The forgotten

In the great war, they told us to walk or die

I chose to walk.

We walked so far that out souls were as worn as our soles

That the ground stopped feeling like ground

That the sky could have swallowed me at any second and I could finally cease to be.

We became children of the earth.

And the earth taught us

That the lives of the living aren’t worth a much as we thought.

When freedom came

I walked out of chains and into life

And I forgot.

Forgot the lessons of the trees

That lay silent in the dust.

For the truth in the food that my mouth craved

For the scars that man carved into the surface of the earth

Many years ago.

...

I’m trying to learn that I don’t matter. Stars, they matter. Trees matter. Clouds and rain matter more than we realise. Life, such a rarity compared to space, that matters. The heartbeat of a newborn child, oh god, that matters. But me? My life and my thoughts, lost among all the other lives and thoughts of everybody who has ever lived and thought? Hardly. I have a mind that works, but amongst all the other great minds and thinkers, it pales into the background. I have hands that create, but compared to the universe I spend my days in, nothing my hands do will last. I am made of the same composition as my neighbour, of the same atoms and structure as the boy down the street who plays his music too loudly. The same heady mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases fill my lungs as well as they filled the lungs of Ghandi, Einstein, Darwin, Buddha and Jesus Christ, but just as that air flowed out of the mouths of heroes and villains, it flows out of mine, nothing I do can keep it.
And with the breath that so willingly leaves my chest, I learn. I inhale modesty, exhale pretention. Inhale the importance of others; exhale the presumptions that I am more than a speck, anchored to the smallest mote of dust in this wide, wide universe.

The importance of hands in letting go

I want to trace the lines of your hands

Learning them as I would learn the way to your door

Each finger runs over the creases

Like a child learning to read for the first time

Like my bare feet that summer

Over the cracks in the cement

In the ground outside your window.

Three years ago,

This would have been a love poem.

I would have written my heart into the spaces between the letters

I knew the underside of your tongue.

But now my heart, what is it?

It drifts like the smoke of a faceless stranger

Faceless like the spaces between my fingers

Where none now call home.

And there’s something about home that gets me

Every time I walk through a door

And feel on the handle the soul of every person

Who has ever left for the last time

And the heartbeats of those who came back.

It’s funny how the seasons change as the earth

Warms its feet, then its hands with the warmth of the sun.

I found a bird with a broken wing

You said that they were pests, that it deserved what it got

But I couldn’t help thinking that I didn’t want to see it hurt

So I left you.

Now my cat sleeps next to me in the evenings

On the couch, he moves closer to me when he needs to

I can’t make him love me

Any more than I can make the stars change flight.

But I still need him.

There was once something I felt I needed to tell you.

Something about the wooden floors and their scars.

Is the pain of the trees any less real?

I don’t want to know about the scars,

Like the stars in the sky

There are just some things I’ll never understand.

And there are the things you tried to hold before they bit through you

Like my teeth, if they were strong enough, they could have

But you took my chin

You always held things with two hands.

They were the most familiar part of your body,

The part I could hold instead your heart.

Now I don’t need to.

Your hands were enough.

Enough to break me apart with the cracks outside your door

And as pieces, I fell through them to the centre of myself

And got up without you.

This morning I’ll hear the bird I saved without you

Each morning it comes to my window

I feed it with some wet bread and sugar

And it looks into my eyes before flying away with a piece of my heart.

You see, I give out parts of my heart like slices of bread

And they keep telling me that one day I’ll run out

But I just can’t stand to see them hurt.

I’m okay.

Each Sunday I roll up the letters my heart has made

I bake them into the bread that I’ll give to the bird I once saved

And I’ll jump the cracks in the pavement.

I’ll wait for my cat to come home before I start dinner

And I’ll hold onto doorhandles

Looking for the soul you left behind.