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.

The Blind Man

There is a man who lives blindfolded. He chose, long ago, to close his eyes to all around him, to give up sight so he could learn what it was like to feel life. He had woken one morning to find a dissatisfaction weighing on his shoulders, a feeling that life just wasn’t enough anymore.

That morning, as he ignored the oily universe that found its way into his morning coffee, he tried to pinpoint what the issue was.

Had he forgotten to pay a bill?

No, that wasn’t it.

Was he going to die today?

Ah, he had felt that feeling before, and yet he was feeling it again, so it mustn’t be very accurate.

A song started playing on the radio, but he had stopped paying attention to such background noise long ago.

At the cafe where he sat for his habitual early luncheon, he didn’t notice the brilliant colours of the sun, forgot to smelt the fragrance of the early spring jasmine on the vines against the wall. As he sat, consumed with contemplation, a woman walked out onto the road in front of him, oblivious to the oncoming traffic.

‘Look out!’ he cried, as a car horn sounded and she jumped back to the curb, only narrowly missing a collision. She waved a thank-you and moved onwards.

He began to think, how much of one’s life goes past without us noticing it?

What moments to we live though, only to forget seconds later?

And as he sat, he began to try and see things. He tried to have the smell of the flowers overwhelm him, tried to see colours that others miss, tried to taste food and have it fill up his senses, tried to know what it would be like to have to turn the music down, to sit in silence and hear the melody from the piano playing in the next street.

Instead of seeing everything, however, he found himself lost in the detail, becoming blinded to all else, and as he walked home, he felt that same sinking feeling of seeing nothing much at all.

There are some people in this world who know what it’s like to really be alive. They carry with them an innate knowledge in their scarred hands of what it’s like to feel things, to have something cut so deep that out whole solar system could fit inside with room to move. In some way they seem to be intimate with the tiny nuances of living, almost as if they see the detail yet are able to stay afloat, resisting the pull to drown in the smells, the tastes, the feel of things.

He decided that he would do whatever he could to feel life once more.

To open his eyes and see the colours of light, feel the whispers of the wind seeping through the crack in the window against their skin.

To know what colours lie in the darkness, the feel of electricity in others fingertips, the resounding thunder of another’s absence.

Know the taste of light just before dawn, the dry, salty cheek of one who hides their tears.

And he felt the absence of these things and he wept.

Wept tears that filled the room, that bought him afloat, drifting him closer to distant lands, and although he was blinded by his tears, he began to feel things that he had long missed, that had finally found their way home.

He awoke the next morning with a resolution to become voluntarily blind, to close his eyes in order to know what life felt like,

Smelt like,

Sounded like.

At first he was shaky, jumping at the unfamiliar birdcalls, stumbling over the familiar irregularities of his floor, burning his fingers on the stove. Soon, though, he became more confident. He started to learn the differing sounds of others footsteps, the smell of the morning and how it felt compared to the afternoon and evening. He began to recognise the different tones of silence, began to hear everything that was never said.

He found there were more words in people’s silences than in the things that they said. In the folds of his bed sheets he found the memories of a girl he had once loved so much he thought his heart would explode. He tried to let his heart feel that way once more, tried to pull down the walls he had built up around it, but he found it harder than he expected.

Slowly, though, amidst the noises he had never fully heard before, he began to chip away at the walls, a conglomerations of every stone anyone had ever thrown at him, bound together with all the resolutions never to be hurt that way again. As he broke down these walls around his chest, he began once more to feel.

Pyramids

The pyramids did not like being built.

I used to go up there in the cool night, they'd tell me of the days when they sat as mountains, when they commanded rivers and watched the world.

I tried to tell them that they were now part of history. That in millennia people would look at them as the symbols of an empire.

'Pssht, that's all human nonsense.' They'd say, and somehow I understood.

 They were no more the symbols of conquest, of human victory and achievement than lost souls looking for their home.

And that is why they are fading, falling apart. Because they never wanted to be part of mans world, never wanted anything more than to sit in the cool of their mountain, glorying in the days when they ruled the world.

The History of the Moon

In days of old, men looked up at the stars and felt an affinity that we have lost. In the age of candles, when women wore their hearts on their handkercheifs and men drew their souls into the maps of a flat earth, they saw the stars as if each one was right outside their front door. 

It was brighter back then, the moon cried. I remember, the light was thick, like butter. You had to slice your way through it just to get to the store, but even then, things were easier. We had a way of doing things, you see, because people would get lost in the light, so thick it was. If it happened to you, you would just have to wait where you were, humming a ditty until someone passed you. It was easy to tell when someone was lost, because the light would turn a different colour around them, sometimes it was blueish, like the veins underneath a thin person's skin. Other times is would turn a pink colour, and you knew you would have to be extra careful with these people, they were the sort who always proclaimed that they never got lost, and it was their embarrassment which changed the colour of the light. When you rescued them out, you would pretend that you knew them, or else they had dropped something further back, and you were merely trying to return it to them. They would smile graciously and move carefully onward. But so thick was the light that this was a common occurrence, if you were careful and knew which ways to go to miss all the thick spots, you could still pass three, four, five people, stuck in the light as you walked down the street.

I used to get lost all the time in the light. It happened so often, I am quite a daydreamer you see, that the light around me began to turn silver whenever I'd become buried in it. My aunt, who seemed to know a lot about the light and how it worked (she was a scientist, and always had some new opinion on the matter, or some new fact they had figured out about it) said that light seemed to move differently around me. Something about my gravity (because we all have gravity, she would say, almost incredulously to my mother when she'd say something counter-factuitive), how I somehow managed to pull this light to me in such a different way to anyone else.

We know now that light moved slower back then, but to us, it seemed the most normal thing on earth. We didn't know any better. The light had been this way in our parents time, and in their parents time and in their parents time, and we supposed that that was just the way things were. The stars were made that way, and that was they way they would stay until they die, if they ever do die, which as my father said, could barely happen in our day, so there's no use thinking about it. But the light didn't stay the same. I remember the day it began to change, I felt it that morning. It was almost as if people found it easier to walk places. I still got stuck, as did many others, but there seemed to be less... friction. Like it wasn't so much of a struggle to find our way through the light. People supposed we were finally getting used to the way things were, but somehow, I felt that it was different this time.

That evening, my aunt bustled in on us in a right state,

'The light' she puffed and panted, 'the light'.

'What about the light?' I asked. I was the only one who really cared. The rest of our family had accepted that things were the way they were and there was no use in trying to understand them, it was all too much and there were more important things to worry about, like the state of the refrigerator or the whiteness of socks.

'The light. It's beginning to move faster.' She announced as she finished the drink I had handed her.

The world became silent to me in that moment. I wanted to ask her what that would mean, but I felt too foolish. Deep inside, though, I felt like a part of my insides were fading away, like tomorrow I'd wake up without a heart or a lung or a kidney and there was nothing I could do about it. My aunt knew though, and she answered me in a whisper.

'It means that things are going to change. We think that a day will come when people won't feel the light as we do.' She hushed my look of panic, 'It's not as bad as you think, there will still be light. But we will be the last to feel the universe like this. It's expanding, you see. And one day, the light will be so far off that it will take years, maybe even hundreds, thousands of years to come back to us.'

I began to notice how things were changing. It was still only in small increments, nothing really happened to cause alarm, I mean to say, nothing to cause everyone else to wonder at the state of things. They never even wondered when the air became thinner, not caused a stir when the seas began to rise. I've heard people say now that the tides began to change because of the nearness of the moon, but it happened completely different. The oceans sent me up there, one evening.

I say it was evening, although there wasn't really any difference. I only call it that because I have become so accustomed to the movement of the earth, the rhythm of its night and day that I have even superimposed it onto my memory. I was out in the water, swimming, when the tides began to rise higher and higher. I would have gotten out of the water, but I had unfortunately become entangled with one of the last remaining patches of thick light, and all I could see was silver. It wasn't the most unpleasant sensation at all, in fact, it was rather lovely, swaying up and down with the rise and fall of the waves, humming to myself a little rhyme my aunt had taught me about the times before colour, surrounded by silver when suddenly, I was propelled upwards, out of the water and into a strange elliptical orbit. At the time I didn't know it was elliptical, or even an orbit at all, I was still surrounded by my patch of light, and oblivious to what was happening. After a while I began to think how I should really be going home now, just in case my family should find me gone and begin to fret. By now, late in the series of events, I had started to notice that something was different. Instead of having to fight my way out of the thick light, I found that my skin had begun to absorb it. Instead of slipping off my skin, it was seeping in, causing my hands and feet and face and all other parts of me to glow with an eerie phosphorous shine. And after that, oh! what a surprise I had to find that I was soaring through the air. And not just any old air, this was new. Fresh, and sort of... thin. And after a lifetime of light as thick as butter, this air was quite refreshing. I felt as if I had been suffocating, I wondered how I managed to live like that for so long, breathing in all that light, it's a wonder my lungs could have even handled it!

And somehow, in the surprise of finding myself in this new air, and admiring my new, glowing appearance, I never did wonder why I was soaring through the air. It seemed almost natural, and I didn't feel in any way that this was something I should stop. 

At first I was very close to the earth. I remember bumping my knees on the tops of mountains and getting lost amongst gatherings of new clouds, but after a while I began to get used to my orbit, and braver too. Soon I pushed my way through the atmosphere, because even that was coming to be quite stuffy, and found myself in the orbit you see me in today. 

My aunt has always come to visit. She was the first moon landing, I believe you could say, although it wasn't so much a giant leap for mankind as a fond aunt coming around to tell me of the newest scientific discoveries, and to keep me updated with her new success at being the worlds leading expert on the moon. And so here I stay, the last remnant of the days where light was as thick as butter, before the world changed, and before the oceans sent me here.