am I capable of writing about a tragedy?
it begins something like if i had left the building earlier to get some kind of yogurt bowl at the dining hall. thinking about it is a bit difficult, and i’m not sure if they had gotten lunch, a sink in the pit of your stomach, if i might not make it out and make out these thoughts as one piece, but instead make indigestible edible fodder. that in a significant way an existence may change, lips dry or mouths dry trying to spell out a difficult change. language gets swept all over the floors, like a mop over a receding flame.
untouched since a couple months ago, a jar of vegetable oil with a coat of waxy plastic wrap, and a leftover bowl of the same oil from dinner. fireplace burning wood made of metal, window to nowhere, four stems of rosemary burned to black, a room washed with the stillness of a dense summer night, what i had then was pieces of porcelain and memories from when i had thrown a wine glass, an old world map, and a scarlet children's rubber ball, miraculously fingerprint free.
a taiyaki with the inside a hardness of stone. a five yen piece thrown into a wishing well, a rock that was softer and lighter to pick up than one might have imagined it.
it sounds like Jo Ann Beard, who in The Fourth State of Matter[1] wrote devastatingly about the 1991 University of Iowa shooting, some physics student harboring jealousy, some professor that gave a prestigious award and then a position to a fellow, a pistol and some doors that should have been locked, rage bottled up in letters back home, before unleashing it and turning the gun on himself. that when i disassembled a long table, a medium table, a top-heavy chair i walked slowly and backwards to the rest of my life, i opened those doors that i had opened previously with berries, granola, a mountain of yogurt abundance but physically empty.
when i had first read beard’s writing, a little kid, i was shocked and vigilantly reread. i studied her diction, her prose, admired her perfect lines. but i never once imagined we might live the same state of matter.
dark chocolate pretzels, cans of coke with tops slightly ajar, a sip taken out and the rest left to fizz to death. cookie cutter plates and painted lady bowls, half a loaf of bread. to love one was to love ones work as surely as the love was to the child and the stuffed animal, and to the adult and to the stuffed animal whose fur was the smell of rosemary and rose softener.
there are only around a dozen houses by the waterfront. you climb on top of a rock and feel the world as atlas felt it. ten boating docks, three stretches of public sand, one notion of existing in a space for a while. someone by the water, someone by the sea. someone on a path walking besides a river, someone below, a dead moth.
don’t want to give it “the”. something is given might if you give it “the” to chew on at the front, qualifiers don’t taste good. sitting at the computer, i tried to understand some generated global shap code, numbers interpreting a bunch of numbers, but then i give up and put up another chair, the first time it felt real to me and the code maybe less artificial. i try to think
a sure sign of fortune, the city builds its glass towers only to the edge of the emperor's palace, that is to say that a yuppie standing at the highest floor could only see the shrubbery up to as high as the stone exterior walls, never to the inside. which is to say the human eye is limited to the extent of our reach.
not a junkie; never having assembled the parts of a computer, loved cars when they were little, drive their dads 1991 porsches with the music a little too loud inside, and the turns carried never a care for the brakes, because the more mileage on the glassy new odometer, the few could slow them down.
in my head i reached for the door