I promised myself I would not write to you until I found her. The cyclones in her semi- circular canal were heavy from the whirlwind that was caused by their spinning – so it took her a minute to find her balance. To be honest, I almost didn’t believe you. Lost hope several times along the way and nearly drowned in a pool of my past before I stumbled upon her.
Only noticing her because my own head was spinning.
Do you ever lick the wounds on your palms? I tried once, it didn’t sting much, but the blood tasted bitter. I couldn’t place my finger on what about it bothered me, but I also knew I didn’t want more. That was a long time ago, of course, the scars soon grew scar tissue. Soon after, my carefully etched psalms lost their legibility. Few words remain of this – instead it is a blur of possibilities. The words that remain themselves are too fragmented to bear any meaning. No matter though, I know the psalms by heart now. The scars remain as a testament to the ways in which I had to learn.
But where are my manners? I write a letter to you – unannounced, uninvited and decide to dwell on my issues. You must have questions yourself. Who am I? Why this letter? Why now? Why you? Or you may not – but it is still considered polite to address this issue.
I am writing this letter because while walking along the beach I found one of your bottles. It was lying in the sand and I thought to myself “no shit, who the hell finds bottles on the beach.” So I got excited and went around telling everyone on the beach that I had found a bottle with a note in it – that was my first mistake. Turns out people don’t imagine that notes in bottles can travel thousands of miles. They imagine the sea as a void – and their island as the only one. So everyone had a logical explanation for your note. That perhaps some child did it. It was a prank. It was for entertainment.(to be fair it didn’t help that your language is not as linear as many would like the information they need – something that I now understand also has its reasons).
But I was obsessed with your note.
So you can imagine my joy when I found another, and another. Constantly washing up on shore. Always in the same place – never regularly. I didn’t mind. I imagined constructing notes of this nature must be difficult. And the sea is not a reliable route. But time and tide stayed in my favour, and the notes kept coming.
Which is why I write this letter. In one of your notes you say you are unsure as to whether your notes ever reach the distant shores. I don’t know whether you still wonder about whether your notes get to the other shore – but this letter shows that they did. A friend of ours, ruined by his vocabulary, wrote on the back of a napkin that these things are dead men talking to each other. We are, of course, dead on arrival. Doomed to be saved by our own damnation – we run headfast into our destruction more times than we need to. They thought alchemy was the flames consuming impurities, but that’s what I saw from your notes. It isn’t is it? It is the impurities consuming the flames. Taking everything that they can from the fire before it burns out – and the alchemist’s job is to keep the fire burning, isn’t it? I ask for confirmation because this is what I suspect but you are the one who wrote the notes and so I expect you to know. Though, as I write this out, I realise that too might be misguided on my part.
Anyway, you were heard, and you were right – she is here.
Send my love to all.
Regards,
A Dependent Observer