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The First Temporary fell from the husk of a meteor and glowed with no particular ambition. The gods had to pin her down so she would not float away, so distracted was this new kind of soul, so subject to drift. To be fair, they had not yet invented gravity. This was back when toads without occupation soared straight up to the clouds, back when employment was the only kind of honest weight you could apply to a life.
takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.
I try to find comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.
She collects dexterity like a precious alloy.
“Kicked out of the ocean for changing the emotional pH of my sector. My feelings were killing all the surrounding aquatic life. I have that effect on people, and apparently also on shrimp.”
“I want to feel my feet on the ground, forever. I want to be a standard human person with a place to belong. How can I ever become permanent if I don’t travel through some moral clouds?”
She softens herself daily, in preparation for receiving love.
But time seeps in around shame’s edges. Unaccounted time, time without sheets or stamps or cards. Time introduces herself to me, to each of my empty hours. Time is a new acquaintance, and she does something funny to my limbs, my worries, my anger, my life.
She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.
she was meant to begin where other people ended. She lived in the acute angle that forecasted the world’s limitations.
Where I will go next, what I will do, what kind of adhesive I am made of, if any kind at all. I think I finally know something, but the knowledge slips away. And then the sea mist and the clouds and the fog return, the trusty dispersion and reconstitution of water.
I mean to say that I’m a literal fossil. I’m a rock formation, holding many impressions from many objects, many beings, many times. I am a walking remembrance.
