For This World
When she feels off, she will lie down and think about what her skeleton looks like—not surrounded by muscle and tissue and fat and blood and fluid and everything else—just the bones. Just the bones and gravity. In what arrangement would the bones fall if all the flesh just vanished?
I ask everyone: do you know that spot in the market? The one that’s usually open late with all the lights on inside? Many strange and ordinary things on display? Almost as if the man who owns it or runs it is a hoarder, but not quite. Everything is delicately arranged and certainly for display. You don’t know the spot?… one of those places in a big city. Lit up at night even when everything else around is closing or closed. It seems like nobody knows what I’m talking about.
Picture it in the most macro way, the baffling enormity. Once _ ___ ____ __ _ ___ ____ insignificant speck of floating dust __ _ __ Calmly come back, past the stars and planets and moons, past our moon and into this atmosphere. Through clouds, past mountains and over oceans, cities and buildings, lakes and rivers, bridges and roads and cars on the roads, people in the cars. Into the body, its muscles and veins and blood and into the cells _ ____ __ ___ and so on.
I look in and my eyes focus and focus. I scan the walls, saccade, noting the passages that lead off down dark tunnels from the main space. Passages that I know I could go down if I concentrate hard enough. Instead I’m distracted by the drawings on the walls inside our CAVE.
Aleksander Hardashnakov
