Four: Beauty & What-is-Its

i. WRITING

I began writing for the first time in months. My work is dense and different from before. I now speak in four voices. It's my favorite thing about writing: I cant always tell where it comes from. Is it channeling, creating or both? Who are these people, where are these places tucked within me? When I walk out of my mind, the world's the same. Yet I'm carrying these others with me, my heart's cleaved into quarters. I'm the seeker Sargasso, the runaway maverick, a disfigured chinese songstress, and the Ophelia of the south. There is something of time in it. The fallacy of names. Travel by train.

ii. RAPTURE

We could not see the Perseids because of an excess of light and a blanket of clouds. It is quiet because he and I still do not know how to talk to each other. I convince myself that this silence is a comfortable one and that it is good to share silence. I am teaching myself to speak with my eyes. He looks at me and my words break. He says: Do you ever think about the Rapture? I say: I try not to. He thinks about it all the time--how beautiful it would be to be left behind in an emptied world. He invites me into his vision. There, we steal cars and sleep in museums. Plants take back the earth. We forget what it means to own things. We live according to astronomy. So long as those fiery horsemen stay out of it.

iii. LOSING

My mother is lost to me. My lover is lost to me. My friends are being scattered all across the country and I am stubbornly stoic about this thing called the future. Somewhere a door has shut inside me and I refuse to feel much of anything. I shrugged time off a long time ago. I turned eighteen and hated myself for it because it required the leaving of younger things. I eat less because I need less. Or maybe I need more and I'm ashamed. Everyday I remember something that was left in the move. It is even worse to recall these things: to lose and lose again. It's not that I am sad. There are remains to be sifted through. It's just strange to see how much you can live without. Soon I will be an ascetic.

iv. RECURRENCES

In the argument of order versus random chance, I say nothing. I have this silly little theory forming in which everything exists at the mercy of overlapping circles. Those circles are years, eras, transformation. They are little vacuums of time and space, little currents into which we get sucked. You are what you are according to what whirlpool you are swimming in. Then you are spun out into a new orbit and that is your life. However, because of gravity, it is possible to return to the old worlds. That is why life feels like one big coincidence: because everything recurs endlessly until it is tossed into the next time-mouth. Pockets of deja vu. Einstein says: "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."