The mind is a sense organ too, its creations mere symptoms of the thing itself. My eyes create images. My mind creates stories. I reach for my zero state, where I can lose the story.
Covalent bonding. The color yellow. Water inside everything.
Hello, I love you. But you are dying, and I am dying, and one of us could die faster than the other, much faster, maybe immediately. I may never see you again. You may always be a shade of a memory to me. Still I love you with the deepest passion I can muster. I love you with the force of a typhoon. I love you until I am dissolved in my love for you. I love you for me, not for you. I love you for the delicious closeness to death and life I find in my loving of you. I love you as a person dead to her own life. I love you without considering who you are. I love you with unconditional forgetfulness. I love you while lying half asleep, half awake, in a bed I inherited.
The crinkled corner of a white pillowcase.
One deep breath.
I am in a half-sleep trance . The world outside my window is as silent and still as it will ever get. Everyone in the neighborhood is sedated by the dark, their frontal minds receding to expose all their deepest secrets as a dim glow at the center of their heads. Every thought excites and terrifies me.
Nobody has ever been here before.
How many living beings on earth?
A blue ink stain on the tip of a finger.
Sitting in a waiting room, on a green leather chair.
Your grandmother’s, grandmother’s, grandmother’s mother.
Mincing a single clove of garlic.
Yourself, ages eight to ten.
A dream home, with bay windows overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The stories you will create when you are three times your current age.
Half asleep, I am mostly free, and entirely vulnerable. I can feel that life is an unknown amalgamation of things that are happening all at once while I bear witness. I can see the stories I am living don’t belong to me. The light of day is eons away. Tonight could be the night when the sun doesn’t rise as I expect it to. I turn my head, and witness woven fibers of cotton, one over, one under, many times. I shift my arm and remember a dream once had of being unconditionally embraced in a lake or swimming pool.
The outer edges of feet.
The hollow tube of throat.
The Grand Canyon, though you’ve never been.
Every book you’ve ever read.
Deep-fried funnel cakes sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Mumbled words in his sleep.
A pang of anxiety, of desire, of need hits, because I feel that the future is like an abacus, and all the beads are being pulled to one side, and all that I desire depends on there being more beads. I need to make something happen. I have to do something fast so that I can satisfy the need now before the beads are all pulled aside, and it is too late for me to have what I want. Like only getting to go to Disneyland when you’re thirty, and though going is better than never going, you can’t possibly enjoy it the way you would have when you were eight.
His familiar face and unsettled stance.
The distance from floor to ceiling.
A stranger’s touch, unexpectedly soft gaze.
How many places have you lived?
Finding her sitting on the toilet seat, weeping.
The smell of forest air.
Endless varieties of toothbrushes lining shelves in an aisle.
The inescapable result of that which is happening.
Freedom in a fish bowl.
The undulating line of mountains in the distance, in a haze of blue, grey, white.
Meeting a friend’s mother and feeling surprised.
Chemistry.
Physics lab in Toronto, underground, beneath stubborn snow.
Freedom in a fish bowl.
Months whittled into moments.
The slight uplift of chin and eyebrows a moment before he begins to speak.
The tangible weight of all words unsaid.
Forgetting yourself, the animal, in the heady consciousness of mid-day sun.
The way a minute passes while laying awake at 3:00am next to a digital clock.
My mind is writing stories that may or may not be original creations.
Once upon a time we were all aquatic lizards.
Your shape, as determined by the one belief that makes you who you are.