Difficult Integration

1. Forming a channel between coincidence and no coincidence, the breath is the conduit for our words. Maybe the task is atomizing communication until it's nothing but bare breath, traceable by/through/to attention. 

I lost the ability to speak last week. My experience of the world was made of attention, time, and perception. I felt myself descend into something simple. My bones felt hollow and deflated, my skin felt easy, my eyes felt extensive. I watched a father and his daughter drink tea on a bench. I watched Chidi cry. I watched Cal's hair shroud his face like seaweed. 

I danced when I got home while eating yogurt after feeling so pointless. The movement was blissfuly unifying. I wasn’t sure what to do with my time. I kept wanting my watch, thinking it would somehow change things. I laid on the floor and saw through my arms and stood on my back and meditated from shoulder to tendon. My body felt like a sibling. Movement impulses were unified and un-judged, maybe pre-judged. 

Pre-verbal, pre-concept, pre-judgment: This is where I was for a couple hours I think. 

        I'm time, we're space. 

2. I think often about how to create efficient systems and minimize waste. I can’t afford to waste anything, least of all time. I think often about the immaterial resources that I spend everyday and aim to build into my routine processes of replenishment. Patience, compassion, attention: My most critical resources. 

And time––that foreigner of a mother––which evades saving. That time only wants to be lost. She only wants to be adored from a distance of mourning. We never wake up together. I never want to get out of bed. Time fucking hates me. She pierces my fingernails unto themselves and snatches my eyeballs from the screen. I check everyone’s Spotify like an OCD father and forty million opportunities slip through my fingernails. Time is a vinegar solution I spray on a perennially smudgy glass table. That time is the rug that always gets bought, or the shoes that I hope anyone is happily wearing now. Time steals sometimes. I really feel it to be true. 

I need to pick up my watch. What will change then? 

3. I make lists to remember things. I think this does something my mind alone can't do. I remember that as a human I've evolved to think and say what I'm thinking to others. Even though I'm not happy about this fact, it remains in my head. I can't ever get everything out of my head. Something alway stays, stains, stares me back in the face. 

Standing on my feet and walking on my heels, clutching you five times this way and a couple times that. Looking at you looking at me I felt very strange in a room with wooden floors and a couple people who I can tell try to avoid me. Whatever I do I can never seem to get away from myself. I can never get the full idea out. I can’t stop eating carbs even though they hurt my teeth and sit in my organs like dried glue. I didn’t want to eat the same breakfast. I want something different. You talked too much. I didn’t like the way my body looks. 

I couldn’t find my breath in that room. I feel like I forgot how to write. And even though I told myself before that the feeling of something is evidence of its existence, I wish I could do something other than what I’m doing right now. "All it is is offerings and responses," I hear anyone say. 

4. I picked up my watch and it did everything I thought it would.

5. I talk to myself while walking and notice that it sounds like English isn't my first language. My words are playful and striving––always directional and hopefully simple. I just want to make the basic image easy to see. I start thinking about the whole mother tongue mythology and about language as a very long event. I will spend my entire life learning a language of particulars. I have to make peace with this fact.