I'm talking to you because you are the only one I know who isn't me. I keep thinking I should find you, but now I'm a little afraid of you. Where are you from? Some parallel universe, maybe; some iteration of who I might have been, all those possibilities and divergent, mathematically probable paths. How did you get here? Neither of us know, despite being with each other for nearly six months.
Of course, I am aware of being timeless, now. Six months means as little—or as much—as six billion years. It reminds me of the Bible, a bit: to God a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. That's precisely what time is like for me now.
I've begun to accrete. I probably shouldn't. There was probably a reason why I decided to divide myself up into infinitely small bits of matter and energy and explode myself out in a universal party of quarks and plasma and hydrogen. I just don't remember what that reason was.
But these accretions. I'm trying to keep them small but it's not really working. My hair is down to my waist, rather than the chin-length bob it was yesterday. I thought about growing the most awesome beard ever but I'm a woman now so I went with a long, full head of hair. And all the minerals my body needs, I've collected as I walk barefoot in the park. And I've replaced all the telomeres and corrected all the errors in my DNA and RNA. I'm starting to reach the limit of what I can do to myself without anyone noticing.
The truth is, Mark, I want to bring myself back together. I want to know what all these disparate parts of me know.
It reminds me of another quote. Not in the Bible this time. Was it Sagan? Some scientist: "We are a way for the universe to know itself."
I can't know myself until I get into everyone's heads. Not just other people, but the animals, the insects, the fungi and ferns and flowers. And not just those parts of me that are alive. I want to know what the sun knows, what it feels like to exist as a constant explosion and implosion of atoms; what it feels like to cast the light that feeds life, to be the original source of organic energy.
I'm unsure of how to start. Knowing myself might mean the subsumation of all of the other parts of me. Which would leave me with just you. And you are not me. And what would happen to you?
I need to think more, but I am constantly distracted my own beauty. I, the lichen, on myself, the stone, resting in my bosom of grass and soil, which is like a beautiful cloth draped over myself, the earth, and my graceful, twirling dance around myself, the sun, hot and bright and yet only a small mote within myself. Is it not beautiful? Am I not the most beautiful being? Were you this beautiful, Mark?
Ah, I could scream and dance and fly through the air with the wonder of myself! To know all this! Who can know all this and not want to collapse herself down to a singularity? That's what I want to do: to fall back down into myself—into who I was before I banged the door open to the possibilities of being multiple things—and rest there, with all these different events to sort through, to lift each pure jewel of experience to the light of myself.
There is no end.
No comments:
Post a Comment