When I’m not sure what to say or do, I seem to leave my body and float quietly in the middle distances as though I am in a warm bath.
If I wanted to, in the gap between these planes, if I allowed myself, I could think about you.
We’ve both escaped, did you realize? Do you? Can you?
Do your thoughts look back at it all with nostalgia, or are you only faintly aware of this blank gray block in your memory banks from that time. Are we all codes in your memory banks? Just another one or just another zero?
In truth, it was such a long time ago that for some things you must be forgiven. But laying here, pruning as the bath water goes cold in the absence of draft, I’m curious now. The sadness was the meat that time fed on and what is left to us now are just the bones, the casings, owl pellets, the scientific remains of what was. Now ours all over again, to pore over with jewelers’ loups, poke at and dust idly with little brushes. I am a paleontologist as I was always meant to be. This is what was, I say, knowingly, and pin a label underneath the shattered ulna.
But when what was was up and running, when there was blood and friction and motion to its form, we didn’t think about the skeletal. Nor the physical laws, the carbon dating that would explain what it was about us that was worthy of eons of study. We were in the thick of it. In the swollen belly of the beast of vast confusion that still holds sway no matter how far I’ve run from the folly of trying to feed it something new. A tyrant of bones left at the bottom of the blank, gray block we pickled ourselves in until the bottom fell out.
I have all of this with me.
This material memory…bricks and blocks and bones. Meant for building, were I the type to drain the tub. I wonder if you have this feeling or have replicated it elsewhere with someone else, made it technicolor and mega-pixelated. I am sure you are sharper now after being drug over the whetstone until you sung. You see things for what they are now. Far better than I do, through the milk of the water that washes away the sand and earth beneath my fingernails, dead skin now made to match that earth, powdered like ashes all over me from scuttling around this dig site, from trying to make a single body out of ten.
We do the best science we know, but no one will know if I get it wrong. No one can say it didn’t have a lovely long neck, it didn’t eat flowers and dance in the moonlight with the King of the Lizards. It’s all just an educated guess. It’s just mine to believe and house on wires in the Great, glass-walled museum, charge as I please.
Come see the beast made of us, see how it lives long after being eaten by Time.
