observation

Listen

listen
I hear my father breathing

Seeing

What I saw was all dead white. When I opened my eyes, the grey light hit what was there and I saw in shades I roughly numbered—guessing, too lazy to count: 256, 1024, a million. It was an effort to stop the scan of the closed scene, to check the flitting of vision over the contours of shadow, that compulsive tracking of the boundaries of tone and color, to arrest its sweep, to capture a circuit of vision and contain it in a scape defined by the paralysis of my head. A lock of the eyes is not possible, they buzz like flies in a box.

Crumbs

At the bottom of the toaster, there is a diminutive desert where the tiny bits of bread have gathered and blow into dunes and traps—beaches even, where a fairly vast silver sea rides smooth to glowing orange streaked horizons, and slim creatures dance mamboesque.

Break

A pin falling from the sky hits me in the chest, and like I was a balloon, explodes the membrane of my skin—excited neurons return to space like streamers of gas pulling the bits of me from my form. But it wasn't the heavens that split me. The source is a particular thing. It hits at an angle so slight, so perfect, so aligned, and so wrong, that it unlocks the pieces. What was seamless separates, stretches out, and tilts away just enough for a rush of air to fill tiny fissures and shadows to appear between parts.

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