an exercise in thought

there’s a reason for almost everything but you don’t have to consider it all at once.

When he was born, the doctors said he would never grow proper eyes, would always need to crawl about like a particularly vindictive mole, ground-dweller, soil-eater. They cradled him in their gloved hands, smelling like the epitome of sterile hygiene, and through bug-eyed spectacles they pronounced him a blemish. Error. Blip in the sequence. Missing factor, forgone multiple.

In every equation there must be equal distribution of laws on both sides. You cannot take from one without taking from the other.

Sometimes, blissed out and high on euphoria, we forget the line that sears itself from across our throats to the land beyond. We breathe, unapologetically, and somewhere out there another man falls dead to the ground. They chance upon him like a fisherman chances upon poisoned, bloated fish in the river: with dismay and regret.

Hypothetically, if he looks into the lights, unapologetically, then by right something else should happen. Stupidity, as it happens, is not easily forgiven, both by the receiver and the Universe itself, because no one wants to be in the presence of someone stupid. Which is kind of laughable, because you yourself can decide what stupid should mean, how stupid someone can be to be called stupid, and whether or not you're stupid enough to be called stupid. But being stupid isn't a noticeable trait, for yourself, because your stupid brain won't be able to comprehend and grasp the overarching fact that, you, are stupid. The word stupid comes into play when someone of a higher intellectual awareness gazes upon their lesser men, scrunches their nose and says it. What are you, stupid? The giver will always be the cleverer. The receiver will always be the stupider.

Ten years from now he will wake up and push the covers off his chest, slide out of bed into the cold biting air, try to fistfight the Man beneath his floorboards, and then go to the shower. Ten years from now he will still stay in the shower without turning the dial, without actually showering, because he has a sofa in there and he can't risk getting it wet, not when he has visitors over. He's checked the news. Ten years from now he won't eat cereal at the table, he doesn't eat anything at all, he turns on the television and lets it scream and clamor and fill the gap in his brain. Exquisite breakfast.

Ten years from now the police will call his phone and be met with a metal pipe clanging SFX, because ten years from now he will think he's funny like that — he's not. Ten years from now he will operate off stolen static and melt himself, and the house, and the flesh and bones, into the crevices that sit hidden in the equation, and then when he blinks, he will be lost in collective.

Now, right now, he blinks and he's more and more. Not less, instead more. Stares into the light like he wasn't born missing a sense. Fifty injured, hundreds dead. No one fears him more than no one, which is to say, no one gives a flying fuck. Not even himself. That's why he's looking into the light right now.

The light blinds him. Except he doesn't know that, because his eyes are gaunt, milky, swimming in rot and algae. He has two ponds where two eyeballs should be. Sometimes, when he cries, pondwater leaks out the way you would expect pus to leak out of a small, pinched pimple. Slow and viscous. He allocates two hours of his busy week just to cry, and even then it's not enough, because crying takes a bloody long time ad by the time his two hours are up only one, small, droplet of pondwater has leaked all the way to his chin.

Anyway, in those ponds, there are identical arrangements of bulrushes, and goldfish. Goldfish don't belong in ponds. When he blinks, his eyelids swallow the bodies of water whole, even the bulrushes and the goldfish - nanosecond sleep, micrometer dream. The lovely bask of sunlight comes back in barely a stutter of time. And time doesn't exist to the goldfish, because in equations where the decimal is too small, too minimal, too many zeroes, you round it off to the significant figure, which is to say, a good solid zero.

The goldfish never die, they just keep swimming. They don't understand the End, because all that there is has always been there, even during the rumored Blinking. Because blinks don't exist in their tiny, micro, fishy brains, and all that does is whatever fish brains contain.

Algae is not favored for eye-ponds, because not only are they distressingly opaque, they can get opaquely distressed as well. Mercifully, the doctor who had overseen his entrance into this sweet holy world had given enough shits to peel open his little infant eyelids, and said, most delightedly, that he's lucky he still has his retinas, and by extension, his optic nerve. That doctor was obviously a quack, because how can you tell just by looking at algae pondwater? And the algae get nervous when they think of that, see, because they know what it's like to be glanced upon, organelles and all, and sucked into a grown man's lips. Utter ugliness. Sometimes he walks into walls and has to apologize to the wall because algae can't apologize for freaking out and splaying themselves all over the eye-ponds, and retinas or not he won't be able to see a single thing.

Strangely enough, on the day he looked into the light, someone came to see him, and it wasn't the man he killed from breathing carelessly, or the fisherman who had found poisoned, bloated fish in his eye-ponds, dismayed and regretful.

Ten years ago he sat on a steep hill and considered rolling down. Yes, rolling, and on a good day he would consider flinging himself right off at that angle that will break his neck. Ten years ago it was a bad day when he sat on his knees and stared down, down, into the evermore and the evergrown, green grass, and said, out loud, I'm going to roll down this hill. Like a fucking idiot, lost in his own concept of childhood joy. Ten years ago he was minus nine-point-six-seven years old (rounded to three significant figures) and if he'd cared enough to climb down the hill with trembling fingers instead of rolling down like a moron, he would've discovered that, against his own will, there hadn’t been a single answer among all that he’d ever proposed throughout his life that had ever been applicable.

But, anyway, ten years ago he curled in on himself in the way he imagines a fetus would, and then threw himself off the hill, tumbling, feeling the minute brush of grassy villi kiss every single exposed kissable part of his body. Namely: lungs, heart, eye-ponds, ribs, pancreas, anus, skin. Ten years ago when he flew off the edge and plummeted onto the grass, he was screaming, laughing, all the things he shouldn't have done if he wanted to know exactly what existed beyond his mind. He let something crawl into his eye-ponds and that was a goldfish, who'd seen the way he'd jumped and split himself open ten times ten times infinity. Scale me like a graph, the goldfish had wondered, and leapt into the confines of his dead, milky, eyes, licked at his waterlogged retina and went to grow more of its own. Flourish! It had cried, swimming in frenzied circles, Then we will fly, my children, we fly!

But, anyway, sine graphs don't reach above the lonely little value of one. The goldfish don't die but they grow chock-full to fill the space in his crying, crawling eye-ponds, and when there's nothing left to breathe they start urging him to jump, again, so they might try again to taste oxygen.

Now, right now, he blinks and he's less and less. He does not remember the hill. He does not remember his heart being kissed. Sweetheart, cold heart, algae heart. Algae heart? Algae does not belong to the heart. Anyway, he lies down after a day of staring into the light and feels, in one fell swoop to the stomach, an epiphany. These days it's too expensive to think a thought. You feel thoughts. Because the brain is a stingy luxury and the heart is a democratic cheapskate.

Anyway, he lies down and he feels an epiphany, tingling at the entrance to his veins, quivering in the back of his throat: I think, I think, I don't need to be loved. It terrifies him, the idea that his blood can blurt words like this to him, like he doesn't care. Tomorrow he will get up and take the closest ruler he can find and try to carve this thought out of his brain — maybe through the wrist — but today he is Tired, Very Tired, and he sees no harm in listening to the wretched things in his blood plasma have to say.

Very good things, actually. He's never praised his blood before, all the little bits of cells. He's always been too caught up about the kissable parts of himself — heart, skin, something, something, something. Something. He does not remember the hill — and he's never, never, thought to open the meat above his pulse point and stick his eye inside, mix the pondwater with the stinging blood. He's never considered the blood kissable, what with its non-solidity, the fleeting flow of existence. He doesn't know how to lay lips on something that doesn't stay still. If it can bleed, it can die; if it can speak, it can love.

Anyway, his blood declares their utmost shock at his willing to listen, and then they waste no time spouting profuse speech after profuse speech at him, heartbroken and alive: He gleans three different lessons from a ten-minutes long session, and none of them sound nice to his ears.

Of course they don't sound good, his blood says, knowledgeably. We're inside, your ears are outside. The walls keep us in and keep them out. They don't know us and we don't know them.

He bled into the green tea he bought for her, three days after whatever it was his blood plasma said to him. Held his shaking finger right above the mouth of the bottle, urged the reluctant drops to let go; but they clung on, tearfully, almost as thick and stubborn as his pondwater eyes. So he said, are you stupid? and then shook them off, watched them swallow the green tea as the green tea swallowed them. He watched her swallow the tea, his blood, watched her run a pink wet tongue over her teeth and said, with all of her hearts, you're such a sweetheart, you know that?

He doesn’t remember her. Or anyone else. He looks into the light and the light blinds him. Rust, iron, oxide, alkali — the goldfish unionise, fossilise, and an unwitting fisherman finds their broken bones, feels that sympathetic rush of dismay and regret, rows off home to find his wife. His wife is dead. Don't remember her, or all the hers, all of the hers, even the one in himself, crouching to fit the shape of his spine like a corpse stuffed in an armchair. He doesn't allow her the luxury of sitting, so he stays up all the time, walks, runs, whatever. Doesn't even remember her. Her. The her in himself. Sometimes he sees her face in the mirror, and when he goes to shower her hands go for his dick. Or whatever it is he has down there. Some kind of alien slab of skin. He gives in, then, buys a sofa off Facebook Marketplace to push into the shower just for her, so when he goes in there she gets so distracted by the euphoria of being able to sit that she forgets she has to torment him. Ten years later he will stop turning on the water to shower, because apparently if she realizes the sofa is wet she ignores it all together and tries to touch him again. He won't have that.

The light was meant to be hers, or whatever it was that he was supposed to love. Some star-strewn manifestation of his greatest illegalities. He dropped a binder on his toe once and swore so loudly, someone knocked on his door a minute later and he was too much of a coward to answer it. Lights blot out the sky in his eye-ponds and he forgets, momentarily, all that he is; algae can be killed, but only by the light, and with its death it drags his well sight along with its sorry self.

The light blinds him. Not that he wasn't already blind before, to everything above and below him; but it really does, this time. His brain panics in trying to pull up those last-second life-flashes-past-your-eyes montages he's seen so often in her favorite dramas. He sees bug-eyed doctors. The pond. The goldfish patriarch. The goldfish matriarch. The fisherman. The hill. The grassy villi. His heart. The blood. Her face. The man. The equation. The line. The lights.