The Archaeology of Habits
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The third drawer still sticks in humid weather. I never learned what she kept there, only that opening it required a particular angle of wrist, a held breath. Sometimes I find my hand hovering above the brass handle, waiting for instructions from a body that isn't mine. I put my finger in the depressions of the pebbling on the handle to understand the handle.
This is what loss does. It gives you tunnels made of shadows, weird edges, holes itching at the pads of your fingers. You become a bloodhound. You paw the ground. You hunt yourself.
Where did you lodge yourself? You will ask yourself. Who can hold you? You will ask yourself. What answers do you hear? How can you know that loss is inside, forming a pocket that moves like a balloon even though it is dead and so there is no air inside of it?
The trail of a bloodhound is a mystery. It leads nowhere yet seems to be a gateway leading away, referring you, skimming the hooded surface of the earth where you grumble to yourself in your dark apartment, in your dark apartment filled with objects still round with air you once breathed: A jacket, upended, with the sleeves too narrow to slip into.
Truth muddles and darkens over time. Memory rides the currents. It bubbles, it drifts around a rock. Stuff gathers in its sedges, patches of algae glow, a foil no one can read. Eventually a thing that arrived when you arrived, head into the future but already returning into the cloud, this thing bears weight again. It becomes sacred. It isn't a reliquary; it didn't hold that which was slain. It is now: an offering, an egg. The shells of birds have also shifted into myth as their flight patterns have become memory--or have we believed too long in memory, in what it can pick up and relocate?
What can you ask of your bones? Perhaps that they linger. Perhaps that they clot.
Your bones survive.
But you never will.
Where are the gods? You will ask yourself. Do I have◆ About the ending
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