To the one who learned to speak in silences

I don’t know how to write your letter.

I’d like to imagine that I have the right words to translate these abstractions into letters on the page but Florence reminds the machine that the heart is hard to translate. But you don’t listen to music often, do you?

Perhaps it is important to know what it looks like to watch from the outside as the body that you have seen walk unflinching into flames show its scars.

Do you ever sit and trade stories of how it was to walk down the streets of some alley overwhelmed by all the love in the world coursing through your veins?

How does it feel to contain an elixir so pure?

That is the wrong question.

I don’t know how to write your letter.

*

We are all just versions of ourselves. To unbecome is to become.

Were you there when they first started peeling the layers from the first fable? Did you witness it? Did it slowly unravel and fall to the ground like a ball of wool, dislodged from an empty seat by a bored cat? Or did it oppose its unravelling? How did you fight it, how did you make it listen? Was it a long and bloody fight? Or were you cunning? Thrusting a spear into its shadow at the last minute?

Did you look into its eyes as it lay there, the first layer of a vastness that is yet to be understood but has definitely been seen?

Let’s make a simple assumption. This battle happened somewhere in the universe. Given, this might not be the case but for the purpose of this discussion let’s assume it did. Do you think NASA will ever stumble upon this battleground in their never ending search for life? And, in finding nothing but death, how will they react to this?

Many questions because I do not know how to write your letter.

Last night I sat in my living room contemplating how many insects would be fornicating for every moment I spent sitting in my living room contemplating. I realized that the more I thought about the question the more complicated it became. Time, as it has been notorious for doing, refused to stop. And, in not stopping, the question would never be answered. Unless, of course, I stopped thinking about the question. But what good are answers if they can’t be felt? And how would I know if I was working towards the answer, or further into creating different forms of the same question?

If there were seven different types of kale planted in a farm whose soil was perfect for mangoes – how would we have the grapes that we so desperately need to make wine?

(insects that fornicate don’t know how to stay sober, but they do find themselves swarming around dead skin)

Is it then, that, if we follow the swarming insects, we will find ourselves standing in the battlefield where it all began? Or do we have to wait until the light hits the Hubble telescope at the right angle for NASA to read it, like the poetry that we once understood but only now long to write? Like I long to write this letter, but find myself lost inside the vortex between hope and longing.

But, like all letters that are written, I can only communicate where I am now, let alone where I’ll be when the letter is complete. Still, at least there’s comfort in knowing that this letter is written, beyond the knowledge of how, where and when. It has been written now. Here, I give you the present and hope that by the time it is past it will point to the future, a space when I (will) know how to write this letter.

Signed,

A dependent observer.