Wednesday, April 15, 2009

There is no road I can tread where I won’t be trodden upon, there is no space where I can be pelted into without boomeranging in a suicidal trajectory, no river that would keep me afloat while singing me to sleep. In flight I’m a death wish waiting for a landing skull but can I become a wishing star? If a rock flies close enough to the sky won't it become a meteor, just as a meteor becomes a rock when it flies close enough to the earth?
This is not what I wish to be- just another creak from a wound-up wheel just another tweak of a tightened gear just another scream just another jolt of this awful machine just another tear that slinks past, unwiped, just another note in this babble of deaf men.

It is not the orderly ordinariness of “just another” that I shrink from but the existence that succeeds these two words. So many other “just another” s would have been nice.
To have been just another rock in a fish tank and grow green and soft with the years that bubble past me like the kisses of fishes. Just another pebble scooped out of a pallanaguzhi cavity snuggled between a girl's fingers and juggled into a dozen others. Just another stone tossed into the waves by a schoolboy perversity to check if it would be borne back to the shore, intact by bobbing waves, as if the sea were a bounding puppy to play catch with. But these stones are retrieved faithfully. Always.

It is not in my nature to be whole. After I was brought forth from an infinity of fissions and an infinity of fissions is what I’ll give myself up to, no spectacular exploding end for me but a ground-down worn-out hammered-flat one. The ignominious farewell that is the lot of a long-used shoe. Of rust.

I was born million-pieced the day I broke away from the earth and my existence can’t be much more than a delayed disintegration, relinquishing a smithereen a day, scattering myself in a dust of death a little at a time. And I’ve learned that if you’re not whole, wholly yourself, you’re nothing.

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