Balanced on the periphery of a funnel, a miniature ballerina was stationed to fulfill a contract she had signed from the beginning of her voyage, a contract which had explicated that, in order to escape en route unscathed, she was to mystify an anxious, navel-gazing crowd, so they could rise and follow by nose a trail of steamy notes and tones destined for obscurity. Her weapon of choice was a prescribed melody she could only remember when she closed her eyes to block out the world around her. Lurid, animalculous configurations embodied an assortment of saints she had chanced upon throughout the course of her 25 years. These iconoclastic figures, who taught her blind how to perform tricks, also generously equipped her with miscellaneous wonders akin to those held by a professional gymnast. As a strategy to elude the puppeteers that had severed her strings and dumped her in this place, she disguised herself to fit the mold of a rambunctious harlot, ensuring any potential access to the natural pulse of her soul was barred. This caused onlookers to turn away with disgust. They were disappointed to find that all she knew to do was swivel, mimicking a protractor. It was a camouflaged sieve she was proud of, a porous mechanism which gave her a rite of passage to traverse levels otherwise closed off from her abilities.
Her name was Rhea, originating from the Greek word “flowing stream”. Instigated by a lifelong struggle with dependency, her relationship with trauma faded shortly after she was prompted by Elijah to pay attention to a secret divinity, decipherable only by those whose adherence to a shrewd assiduity with respect to instinctual teachings marked the essence of their determination to strive for supremacy over what could be captured from the outside. These signs were otherwise hidden within the mundane; infused with advertisements tailored by a cloaked algorithm. Elijah’s sudden presence in her life was enough to catch a glimpse of the underlying arrangement, and this allowed Rhea to comprehend where void space stood in creation whenever she forced herself to focus on tuning in.
Easier said than done.
Nestled fibers on a train platform oscillate into a single vibration, ruffling friction, causing goose bumps to evaporate, shudder, disintegrate and melt with an hourglass down a chain; held tight at seams resting afloat above the hands of a disheveled commander. Waiting and spreading yawns.
‘Routine is an incomprehensible waste of probability’ she mumbled to herself, catching the smile of an elderly woman in a scarf made of Persian silk, another reminder of the Middle East. Her brain was greasy from harboring the burden of a dejected preoccupation with apportionment, dissection and compartmentalization. A stalling screech flared a sparkling charcoal fragrance misty, destined to linger and fall subtle on various textures, consistencies, materials and shapes. The crowd in the West did not bustle as it did in the East; commuters had room to languidly dawdle in search of a place to sit down.
Her eyes were closed, holding back a steep density which could be climbed from her stomach to her throat by any brave, acrobatic bodies willing to sacrifice their sensibilities in exchange for falling to a risky temptation with little reward other than the thrill of a rush in the name of solace. Whispers crept through corridors and solidified tight a delicate, shadowy formation which resembled a feeble enlacement of fingers mindful of impending decay. Shapes flit past the train window as the cell shook into action, waving the color of the wind translucent. Black against the gray-heat of the box therein she was caved; Rhea caught the gaze of a man in the reflection of a window beside her and noticed he bore resemblance to a well-known politician. Imagination tossed direction out of scope. In transit she could manoeuvre and mold vague notions into a cataclysmic crescendo representative of psychological turns. The same could not be said for stillness. This man was an unwelcome prototype as a crystallized fraction. She could imagine him to be the type of lover to feign an interest in her skill-set so that he may find reason to flex his own by sliding innuendos into conversation. Daydreaming was a testing of limit, a flirting procedure when successful. Crevices holding a nervous assortment of particles cracked open, spilling an angelic vapor over slippery surfaces from the inside of a transparent bottle.
No importance was to be attached to any single movement; her projections moved with footsteps she could recall when she was a child. The scope she understood was a reaching for a threshold, with duty serving as an equal to fate. Her world was an isolated scrap book, filled with discordant revelations, volatile to the touch. The act of belief is the unifying moment, the cleaving of one thing to another. Distinguished in frame, irresolute in mind, all of the factors considered up until this point of the charade had been taken to be an account of consecrated misgivings, the emblem of sacrifice; a vague provocation erring on the side of an undesirable predilection.
She had earlier carelessly stuffed blueprints commissioned by the tech firm she was working for into her backpack. They were reliant on future outcomes that had been preconceived within the system already, so she knew they could be replicated. ‘In order to be considered valid, this much could be ascertained in the moment’ she mumbled. A furtive blinking held them apart. On one side, the careful elaboration of process architecture is flawed in that if considered to its conclusion, would lead to an infinite digression. If every aspect could be pinpointed and reduced to a function or element involved within a system, a static stratosphere would render the observer obsolete, thereby cutting off the flow between the input and the output. The conveyance of information is what constitutes data. Technology is nothing without the imperative of intention. All commuters shared this commonality, regardless of the destination.
She tried to ignore the news, as she had only so much tolerance for political affairs. In the back of her mind however, she knew degeneracy would be legalized to its full extent very soon. She did not mind this and imagined she would be swept under lock and key by a man with a big screen inside of the basement of an Amazonian glass mansion. Then, she could finally focus on her dream of inventing a new type of performance art which he could pay to stream out onto the streets via a webcam in return for poorly constructed revelations. Only, he won’t notice they are poorly constructed because like most men, his ability see his own screen would be obstructed by pictures of his mother.
On the other side of her imagination, a carefully fabricated cipher clung a dissolving nexus over the ancient roots of an olive tree. The rough-hewn lines of a surging tangle were purported to have been evidence that the core of the image could be reduced to a stalled, uncomplicated consideration. However, the letters were too tiny to be distinguished and required a magnifying glass to be considered worthy of further investigation. The perpetual motion of the sun rumpled different areas apart from each other, invoking origami wings to embrace a misplaced breath. Entrenched within bulging creases were folded messages, undelivered, attuned to an all-pervasive impression Rhea noticed was constantly morphing a stylistic reminder of a rubble set fire in water; a contorted refraction of temperature reduced to ash.
What colored her world was a proselytized version of longing for respect from contemporaries above her. This resulted in propulsion up a ladder shaved narrow with ascent. Climbing alone became necessarily dispensable; replaced by the grabbing of convulsing hands. It was amusing, that people believed nature required a contract. Culture detracts from natural responses; it is a symbol of belonging inseparable from community. On the surface this leads to competition, with a figurehead always looming from an apex. Who can have or express the best version of what that community intends to represent, who can show they are the most true to the spirit of the community? Isolation is a vacuum where time remains unchanged and is stalked by a claim through which all growth is measured. Impossible. What was more interesting: the shape through which disposition presents itself. Underneath the fray was a different story, a fossilized pressure exacerbated by the bubbling of an indeterminate brook, connected by a single substance and separated by a shivering glaze. It didn’t matter what was interesting here, as it made no sense except from the vantage point of community, where emulation was the key to understanding it.
The strategy used to grasp control of it was to hold onto the things that they appreciated. Difficult, when the maze was stuffed with paper. Infiltration held a steadfast grip, tentatively wavering in anticipation of a collapse.
As the carriage rattled gently, she looked down at her phone screen.
Elijah: I desire limbo and am resigned to my fate. You may just be the angel that will liberate me.
The branches connected to the melody the ballerina remembered, bloomed on the side of darkness, piercing holes into a crystal that could pour light over her frame if it were not for the reservation of distance. Instead, the rays of light were refracted back at him, reminding him of a white desert. Even if he was capable of piecing together disparate ideas, context remained constant as a divisive justification to separate him from his convictions. As a man he is suspended inseparable from his landscape, encapsulated behind a glossy Perspex frame. Firm hands, proportionate to lost sensations, curl a nostalgic vision into a faint outline over wrought iron tresses. An unruly green, reminiscent of a fleeting inspiration, relevant to the defeat of self-imposed attrition, was obstructed by an inverse shadow and weaved to a shroud of stark, viscous contours. Manifolded over soft, slanted pastels, a deep exhale is caught, the one earlier lost, crawling a hint of tomorrow in an elusive, magnetic heave. He was in the Middle East, where the struggle for clarity in rasping moments grow inside of a hollow shell, full of tense thoughts cataloged in order of obscurity, one after the other. Consumed by a longing he had once found in a dream, his amusement with all he had come to apprehend escaped from a suffix ingrained to fantasy. A silken fissure emanated all he had gleaned raw and laminated pure up to this point; the thought of a pastime incongruent with his sense of belonging hung heavy over his heart as fireflies grazed a lightly blooming sting over each of his organs.
This scene was the centerpiece of his self-portrait; it provided him with a key to unlocking the dimension nestled between shifting and shade. Swerved diagonal, the streetlights in the middle of his observation resembled the scales of justice. A fading horizon glistened his fate before him in the reflection of an indiscernible crumble. Man is a trail; left behind by tessellating figments and carried along a great golden chain, annexed from his ruins at the moment of his birth, desperate to carve the meaning behind his verses into easily recitable incantations.
Together, they had stumbled into a collapsing universe, folding orbitals into bows and bows into cords they could use to connect with each other. Lattice and engineering provided them with a sense of hope for unity in a world jagged by degree.
Sailing along a cross-hatched version of the Milky Way, boundless waves lapped below them. He had woven his ideas from a background in economics to form the grooves of a decentralized impetus aimed towards unraveling the mysteries behind the evanescent quilt of time. Her aim for absolution created something tangible out of something ephemeral. Swimming from one point to another, chasing a fixed mirage which dangled a stretch past a threshold further than they could grasp and pull back in; space was quiet except for the sound of hooves galloping over shriveling stars. Tension made them flexible.
Collecting various objects (mainly shells, algae and stones) kept inadequacy at bay. Had these items always been there? Or were they a rope made of water left behind by desperate explorers on a desolate plain? Could this dissipating trail be pushed through the teeth with the lungs, or was it zipped behind the pearly gates? It could certainly be demarcated through fantasy; this construction held surrounding their things. Sleep and breath were figuratively meshed in the nooks between discordant time cycles. In the corners of a ledge, a tapestry fenced off from noise was safely hidden, so when something went missing behind the lounge, it would emerge powerful and brave; a reminder of the difference between intention and placement.
Their connection started with a chirpy, tip-toeing baseline. An inexorable trajectory had begun to plot an unclear scheme, tracing a tight-rope between two buildings separated by oceans. His heart, country, the spirit of his birth, was landlocked in opposition to her confinement sustained on a tiny island colonised by rejected convicts. Rolling dizzy, an out-stretched wheel bounced a disc into a black hole. Kinetic spirals hooked on luminous textures glittered with a rain peeling backwards-falling somersaults over an enamel vibration. Their world melded into a circus, welcoming in a kaleidoscopic jungle shaped like a Rubik’s cube. With each tap of a wand to a string, the host was visible; obsessing over tubular razors intended to slice dents of filigree precision over various surfaces. A door slid open, tightening the reigns between two organs dying at a different rate.
A cold wind gently blew riddles through the strands of Elijah’s hair as he cycled upward, each consideration subsumed by a multiplicity of reminders related to his business. Unable to grasp at a single form, the flapping of synchronized wings caught his attention for a moment, connected by the shape of sighing ghosts lost to a mist of idle wonderings. He contemplated the distance between what was stretched out before him and what he had left behind. A statue of the Virgin Mary stared him down from what he knew to be the peak of the mountain from previous ventures. He was a creature of habit and his handwriting reflected this. Tiny, evenly distributed letters were slanted romantically to appease his obsession with ensuring the utmost of conservation on a page.
He pulled out his phone after he had dismounted and rested his bicycle on the statue.
Rhea: My mother is proud of what she considers to be stability, but what she considers to be stability is anything she can convince herself is ‘good enough’. Her respect for the rules is a denial about what those rules mean outside of feeling validated for following through with expectation. I see both of my parents inside of me and it disgusts me, because I do not respect them.
Elijah’s thoughts transpired from exaltation to relief as he inhaled the arid mountain-scape around him; on the brink of a pulmonary hypertension – his breath had thinned out, stolen either by the scene or a memory he had grown to miss of a soft flesh he had never witnessed, only imagined as a distraction from an obsession cultivated over foreign transaction fees. A warped narrative was transfigured, re-established by a corrosion he allowed to slip away from him in exchange for momentary lucidity. Profundity was a foolish and inconsistent endeavor. Understanding this, however, did not stop the cravings, which forced both of them into the reticent acceptance of incapacity; an enthralling consequence of uncertainty they shared as a compass that did not comply with reasonable negotiation. Another gap glared a prominent match with their distance. Generational taboo - Elijah was twice Rhea’s age. Despite the soul connection, she was his daughters’ age, which meant that their wishes were scattered indistinguishable from a clutter of shrill vocal vibrations distinct to local cafes.
Elijah: There is a temptation here to follow through with surrender. I worry if I were to one day commit to erasing all of my convictions and abstractions in favour of composing a string of comprehensible statements; I would not be received so kindly by the company chosen for me. I prefer charred remnants to engulfed footprints. Perhaps philosophers choose verbosity over the divine to illuminate a cruel irony related to dislocation.
As he waited for her response to be delivered alongside his meal, a chimerical murmur of shadows carved barbed molten initials into a deadlocked kinetic silence; trapping shut his ability to speculate on the future. Dust flit; quantum excitations disappeared and reappeared at different points in the air, intuitively migrating from sputter, to pulsation, to pump against blinding blades of streaming sunlight in the shape of raw goose bumps. His mind had gone where? What could he import as a conclusion? Chipped enamel, in the spark of a cigarette lighter reflected against a peeling wallpaper?
Paris. France. 2019. Burrowed among plastic horns, discordant conversations fumbled with a slithering cloth. Meaningless utterances captured moments of resplendence and clashed with a baptism of fire that could be heard streaming from a back-street third floor apartment building. Rolling, invisible tendrils destined up noses gushed to escape from heat through open windows. A murky evaporation shrouded glistening scales reflective; in the correct direction. Wrapped in dirt and squirming underground, flowers tangled up in nervous fingers spindled homage to a leaning damsel across from the café. Her vase-hips were anchored feverishly to a capricious railing, wrench-torqued by the spine, goggling tentacled synchronicities into a thoughtless awareness; she tumbled off of her balcony, and her limbic system was fried under an open bonnet casket cushioned by engines. Elijah flinched and turned away. The rush continued. Hairy-bellied grease mongers flipped pancakes over in the name of multifarious horses they had encountered within fields footed to mansions. Kitchen utensils clanged the symphony of chaos and mingled with sly, confident bodies, seared to their element by virtue of behavioral repetitions. The slick hands of the workers in the cafe were blurred by the motion of a demand inextricable from the rhythm of the law. A constant clasping of palms over a bell vicariously positioned on the edge of the counter invoked an unpredictable reverberation, lapsing circles around legs, cheeks and unrestrained laughter; a response to the breaks between solidarity and comprehension. His frozen skeleton was a reminder that madness could only be cured by the valorisation of beauty.
Rhea: I am on the verge of being converted into a withered husk at any moment now.
Fitting. No response for days.
Her train halted to the sound of children screaming in a blend of car alarms and distant howling. Outside, on the platform, the tone was of burnt orange triangles against a cartoon blue. A riot had ensued and the train was in lock-down. Passionate youth were jumping from all directions off of every visible ledge displayed. Rhea assumed it was a climate change protest. She imagined them to sink below the ground, embedded viscous by examination under a man who had pulverized their spines with his heel. Examining them further, he pulled out a stethoscope. Foam split, paradise evolved, a voice kept in a jar loose-lidded and forcibly wrenched by an outward reckoning; she blinked and checked her phone, hoping to feel the warmth of good news elsewhere. A deafening snarl erupted, the sound of panic overrode everything. It was terminal.
Rhea: She’s gone.
Standing up to ease a restless and unconscionable vertigo, the surrounding spin matched her sluggish inability to block out a sudden flood of regret reducible to all of the moments she had acted erratically towards her mother. Rhea climbed over an elderly man seated beside her, whose briefcase was planted on top of his lap. Probably covering something. He grimaced, offended. Her grasp was weak; her arm was barely able to keep her body propped up against the railing which led on to the middle section of the 3-tiered carriage. Sweeping the field, all of the passengers appeared to be drooling in response to the chaotic rumble outside, as though they were seated at the last supper and wearing bibs and banging palms holding cutlery onto a wooden table.
Hours on, nothing changed, the train began to melt and droop, slowly compressing the motley of bewildered faces flecked around her, which eventually disappeared into a vacuum alongside a musky powder. Piece by piece, Rhea took this as an invitation to undress herself. Unable to cope with the death of her mother, she had convinced herself that hell coincided with her absence. Elijah’s radio silence was an extension of her hatred for her father, the only man she had ever loved in purity. He was busy running errands for his secretary to record.
Her name was Rhea, originating from the Greek word “flowing stream”. Instigated by a lifelong struggle with dependency, her relationship with trauma faded shortly after she was prompted by Elijah to pay attention to a secret divinity, decipherable only by those whose adherence to a shrewd assiduity with respect to instinctual teachings marked the essence of their determination to strive for supremacy over what could be captured from the outside. These signs were otherwise hidden within the mundane; infused with advertisements tailored by a cloaked algorithm. Elijah’s sudden presence in her life was enough to catch a glimpse of the underlying arrangement, and this allowed Rhea to comprehend where void space stood in creation whenever she forced herself to focus on tuning in.
Easier said than done.
Nestled fibers on a train platform oscillate into a single vibration, ruffling friction, causing goose bumps to evaporate, shudder, disintegrate and melt with an hourglass down a chain; held tight at seams resting afloat above the hands of a disheveled commander. Waiting and spreading yawns.
‘Routine is an incomprehensible waste of probability’ she mumbled to herself, catching the smile of an elderly woman in a scarf made of Persian silk, another reminder of the Middle East. Her brain was greasy from harboring the burden of a dejected preoccupation with apportionment, dissection and compartmentalization. A stalling screech flared a sparkling charcoal fragrance misty, destined to linger and fall subtle on various textures, consistencies, materials and shapes. The crowd in the West did not bustle as it did in the East; commuters had room to languidly dawdle in search of a place to sit down.
Her eyes were closed, holding back a steep density which could be climbed from her stomach to her throat by any brave, acrobatic bodies willing to sacrifice their sensibilities in exchange for falling to a risky temptation with little reward other than the thrill of a rush in the name of solace. Whispers crept through corridors and solidified tight a delicate, shadowy formation which resembled a feeble enlacement of fingers mindful of impending decay. Shapes flit past the train window as the cell shook into action, waving the color of the wind translucent. Black against the gray-heat of the box therein she was caved; Rhea caught the gaze of a man in the reflection of a window beside her and noticed he bore resemblance to a well-known politician. Imagination tossed direction out of scope. In transit she could manoeuvre and mold vague notions into a cataclysmic crescendo representative of psychological turns. The same could not be said for stillness. This man was an unwelcome prototype as a crystallized fraction. She could imagine him to be the type of lover to feign an interest in her skill-set so that he may find reason to flex his own by sliding innuendos into conversation. Daydreaming was a testing of limit, a flirting procedure when successful. Crevices holding a nervous assortment of particles cracked open, spilling an angelic vapor over slippery surfaces from the inside of a transparent bottle.
No importance was to be attached to any single movement; her projections moved with footsteps she could recall when she was a child. The scope she understood was a reaching for a threshold, with duty serving as an equal to fate. Her world was an isolated scrap book, filled with discordant revelations, volatile to the touch. The act of belief is the unifying moment, the cleaving of one thing to another. Distinguished in frame, irresolute in mind, all of the factors considered up until this point of the charade had been taken to be an account of consecrated misgivings, the emblem of sacrifice; a vague provocation erring on the side of an undesirable predilection.
She had earlier carelessly stuffed blueprints commissioned by the tech firm she was working for into her backpack. They were reliant on future outcomes that had been preconceived within the system already, so she knew they could be replicated. ‘In order to be considered valid, this much could be ascertained in the moment’ she mumbled. A furtive blinking held them apart. On one side, the careful elaboration of process architecture is flawed in that if considered to its conclusion, would lead to an infinite digression. If every aspect could be pinpointed and reduced to a function or element involved within a system, a static stratosphere would render the observer obsolete, thereby cutting off the flow between the input and the output. The conveyance of information is what constitutes data. Technology is nothing without the imperative of intention. All commuters shared this commonality, regardless of the destination.
She tried to ignore the news, as she had only so much tolerance for political affairs. In the back of her mind however, she knew degeneracy would be legalized to its full extent very soon. She did not mind this and imagined she would be swept under lock and key by a man with a big screen inside of the basement of an Amazonian glass mansion. Then, she could finally focus on her dream of inventing a new type of performance art which he could pay to stream out onto the streets via a webcam in return for poorly constructed revelations. Only, he won’t notice they are poorly constructed because like most men, his ability see his own screen would be obstructed by pictures of his mother.
On the other side of her imagination, a carefully fabricated cipher clung a dissolving nexus over the ancient roots of an olive tree. The rough-hewn lines of a surging tangle were purported to have been evidence that the core of the image could be reduced to a stalled, uncomplicated consideration. However, the letters were too tiny to be distinguished and required a magnifying glass to be considered worthy of further investigation. The perpetual motion of the sun rumpled different areas apart from each other, invoking origami wings to embrace a misplaced breath. Entrenched within bulging creases were folded messages, undelivered, attuned to an all-pervasive impression Rhea noticed was constantly morphing a stylistic reminder of a rubble set fire in water; a contorted refraction of temperature reduced to ash.
What colored her world was a proselytized version of longing for respect from contemporaries above her. This resulted in propulsion up a ladder shaved narrow with ascent. Climbing alone became necessarily dispensable; replaced by the grabbing of convulsing hands. It was amusing, that people believed nature required a contract. Culture detracts from natural responses; it is a symbol of belonging inseparable from community. On the surface this leads to competition, with a figurehead always looming from an apex. Who can have or express the best version of what that community intends to represent, who can show they are the most true to the spirit of the community? Isolation is a vacuum where time remains unchanged and is stalked by a claim through which all growth is measured. Impossible. What was more interesting: the shape through which disposition presents itself. Underneath the fray was a different story, a fossilized pressure exacerbated by the bubbling of an indeterminate brook, connected by a single substance and separated by a shivering glaze. It didn’t matter what was interesting here, as it made no sense except from the vantage point of community, where emulation was the key to understanding it.
The strategy used to grasp control of it was to hold onto the things that they appreciated. Difficult, when the maze was stuffed with paper. Infiltration held a steadfast grip, tentatively wavering in anticipation of a collapse.
As the carriage rattled gently, she looked down at her phone screen.
Elijah: I desire limbo and am resigned to my fate. You may just be the angel that will liberate me.
The branches connected to the melody the ballerina remembered, bloomed on the side of darkness, piercing holes into a crystal that could pour light over her frame if it were not for the reservation of distance. Instead, the rays of light were refracted back at him, reminding him of a white desert. Even if he was capable of piecing together disparate ideas, context remained constant as a divisive justification to separate him from his convictions. As a man he is suspended inseparable from his landscape, encapsulated behind a glossy Perspex frame. Firm hands, proportionate to lost sensations, curl a nostalgic vision into a faint outline over wrought iron tresses. An unruly green, reminiscent of a fleeting inspiration, relevant to the defeat of self-imposed attrition, was obstructed by an inverse shadow and weaved to a shroud of stark, viscous contours. Manifolded over soft, slanted pastels, a deep exhale is caught, the one earlier lost, crawling a hint of tomorrow in an elusive, magnetic heave. He was in the Middle East, where the struggle for clarity in rasping moments grow inside of a hollow shell, full of tense thoughts cataloged in order of obscurity, one after the other. Consumed by a longing he had once found in a dream, his amusement with all he had come to apprehend escaped from a suffix ingrained to fantasy. A silken fissure emanated all he had gleaned raw and laminated pure up to this point; the thought of a pastime incongruent with his sense of belonging hung heavy over his heart as fireflies grazed a lightly blooming sting over each of his organs.
This scene was the centerpiece of his self-portrait; it provided him with a key to unlocking the dimension nestled between shifting and shade. Swerved diagonal, the streetlights in the middle of his observation resembled the scales of justice. A fading horizon glistened his fate before him in the reflection of an indiscernible crumble. Man is a trail; left behind by tessellating figments and carried along a great golden chain, annexed from his ruins at the moment of his birth, desperate to carve the meaning behind his verses into easily recitable incantations.
Together, they had stumbled into a collapsing universe, folding orbitals into bows and bows into cords they could use to connect with each other. Lattice and engineering provided them with a sense of hope for unity in a world jagged by degree.
Sailing along a cross-hatched version of the Milky Way, boundless waves lapped below them. He had woven his ideas from a background in economics to form the grooves of a decentralized impetus aimed towards unraveling the mysteries behind the evanescent quilt of time. Her aim for absolution created something tangible out of something ephemeral. Swimming from one point to another, chasing a fixed mirage which dangled a stretch past a threshold further than they could grasp and pull back in; space was quiet except for the sound of hooves galloping over shriveling stars. Tension made them flexible.
Collecting various objects (mainly shells, algae and stones) kept inadequacy at bay. Had these items always been there? Or were they a rope made of water left behind by desperate explorers on a desolate plain? Could this dissipating trail be pushed through the teeth with the lungs, or was it zipped behind the pearly gates? It could certainly be demarcated through fantasy; this construction held surrounding their things. Sleep and breath were figuratively meshed in the nooks between discordant time cycles. In the corners of a ledge, a tapestry fenced off from noise was safely hidden, so when something went missing behind the lounge, it would emerge powerful and brave; a reminder of the difference between intention and placement.
Their connection started with a chirpy, tip-toeing baseline. An inexorable trajectory had begun to plot an unclear scheme, tracing a tight-rope between two buildings separated by oceans. His heart, country, the spirit of his birth, was landlocked in opposition to her confinement sustained on a tiny island colonised by rejected convicts. Rolling dizzy, an out-stretched wheel bounced a disc into a black hole. Kinetic spirals hooked on luminous textures glittered with a rain peeling backwards-falling somersaults over an enamel vibration. Their world melded into a circus, welcoming in a kaleidoscopic jungle shaped like a Rubik’s cube. With each tap of a wand to a string, the host was visible; obsessing over tubular razors intended to slice dents of filigree precision over various surfaces. A door slid open, tightening the reigns between two organs dying at a different rate.
A cold wind gently blew riddles through the strands of Elijah’s hair as he cycled upward, each consideration subsumed by a multiplicity of reminders related to his business. Unable to grasp at a single form, the flapping of synchronized wings caught his attention for a moment, connected by the shape of sighing ghosts lost to a mist of idle wonderings. He contemplated the distance between what was stretched out before him and what he had left behind. A statue of the Virgin Mary stared him down from what he knew to be the peak of the mountain from previous ventures. He was a creature of habit and his handwriting reflected this. Tiny, evenly distributed letters were slanted romantically to appease his obsession with ensuring the utmost of conservation on a page.
He pulled out his phone after he had dismounted and rested his bicycle on the statue.
Rhea: My mother is proud of what she considers to be stability, but what she considers to be stability is anything she can convince herself is ‘good enough’. Her respect for the rules is a denial about what those rules mean outside of feeling validated for following through with expectation. I see both of my parents inside of me and it disgusts me, because I do not respect them.
Elijah’s thoughts transpired from exaltation to relief as he inhaled the arid mountain-scape around him; on the brink of a pulmonary hypertension – his breath had thinned out, stolen either by the scene or a memory he had grown to miss of a soft flesh he had never witnessed, only imagined as a distraction from an obsession cultivated over foreign transaction fees. A warped narrative was transfigured, re-established by a corrosion he allowed to slip away from him in exchange for momentary lucidity. Profundity was a foolish and inconsistent endeavor. Understanding this, however, did not stop the cravings, which forced both of them into the reticent acceptance of incapacity; an enthralling consequence of uncertainty they shared as a compass that did not comply with reasonable negotiation. Another gap glared a prominent match with their distance. Generational taboo - Elijah was twice Rhea’s age. Despite the soul connection, she was his daughters’ age, which meant that their wishes were scattered indistinguishable from a clutter of shrill vocal vibrations distinct to local cafes.
Elijah: There is a temptation here to follow through with surrender. I worry if I were to one day commit to erasing all of my convictions and abstractions in favour of composing a string of comprehensible statements; I would not be received so kindly by the company chosen for me. I prefer charred remnants to engulfed footprints. Perhaps philosophers choose verbosity over the divine to illuminate a cruel irony related to dislocation.
As he waited for her response to be delivered alongside his meal, a chimerical murmur of shadows carved barbed molten initials into a deadlocked kinetic silence; trapping shut his ability to speculate on the future. Dust flit; quantum excitations disappeared and reappeared at different points in the air, intuitively migrating from sputter, to pulsation, to pump against blinding blades of streaming sunlight in the shape of raw goose bumps. His mind had gone where? What could he import as a conclusion? Chipped enamel, in the spark of a cigarette lighter reflected against a peeling wallpaper?
Paris. France. 2019. Burrowed among plastic horns, discordant conversations fumbled with a slithering cloth. Meaningless utterances captured moments of resplendence and clashed with a baptism of fire that could be heard streaming from a back-street third floor apartment building. Rolling, invisible tendrils destined up noses gushed to escape from heat through open windows. A murky evaporation shrouded glistening scales reflective; in the correct direction. Wrapped in dirt and squirming underground, flowers tangled up in nervous fingers spindled homage to a leaning damsel across from the café. Her vase-hips were anchored feverishly to a capricious railing, wrench-torqued by the spine, goggling tentacled synchronicities into a thoughtless awareness; she tumbled off of her balcony, and her limbic system was fried under an open bonnet casket cushioned by engines. Elijah flinched and turned away. The rush continued. Hairy-bellied grease mongers flipped pancakes over in the name of multifarious horses they had encountered within fields footed to mansions. Kitchen utensils clanged the symphony of chaos and mingled with sly, confident bodies, seared to their element by virtue of behavioral repetitions. The slick hands of the workers in the cafe were blurred by the motion of a demand inextricable from the rhythm of the law. A constant clasping of palms over a bell vicariously positioned on the edge of the counter invoked an unpredictable reverberation, lapsing circles around legs, cheeks and unrestrained laughter; a response to the breaks between solidarity and comprehension. His frozen skeleton was a reminder that madness could only be cured by the valorisation of beauty.
Rhea: I am on the verge of being converted into a withered husk at any moment now.
Fitting. No response for days.
Her train halted to the sound of children screaming in a blend of car alarms and distant howling. Outside, on the platform, the tone was of burnt orange triangles against a cartoon blue. A riot had ensued and the train was in lock-down. Passionate youth were jumping from all directions off of every visible ledge displayed. Rhea assumed it was a climate change protest. She imagined them to sink below the ground, embedded viscous by examination under a man who had pulverized their spines with his heel. Examining them further, he pulled out a stethoscope. Foam split, paradise evolved, a voice kept in a jar loose-lidded and forcibly wrenched by an outward reckoning; she blinked and checked her phone, hoping to feel the warmth of good news elsewhere. A deafening snarl erupted, the sound of panic overrode everything. It was terminal.
Rhea: She’s gone.
Standing up to ease a restless and unconscionable vertigo, the surrounding spin matched her sluggish inability to block out a sudden flood of regret reducible to all of the moments she had acted erratically towards her mother. Rhea climbed over an elderly man seated beside her, whose briefcase was planted on top of his lap. Probably covering something. He grimaced, offended. Her grasp was weak; her arm was barely able to keep her body propped up against the railing which led on to the middle section of the 3-tiered carriage. Sweeping the field, all of the passengers appeared to be drooling in response to the chaotic rumble outside, as though they were seated at the last supper and wearing bibs and banging palms holding cutlery onto a wooden table.
Hours on, nothing changed, the train began to melt and droop, slowly compressing the motley of bewildered faces flecked around her, which eventually disappeared into a vacuum alongside a musky powder. Piece by piece, Rhea took this as an invitation to undress herself. Unable to cope with the death of her mother, she had convinced herself that hell coincided with her absence. Elijah’s radio silence was an extension of her hatred for her father, the only man she had ever loved in purity. He was busy running errands for his secretary to record.
Comments
Post a Comment