handle

No one knows your name. You aren't sure of what to call yourself, either. If a question mark had legs and moped around the living room alone, it would be you. So maybe your name is Question? It's not. That's ridiculous. Only a drunk would name a newborn Question, but maybe the epidural clouded your judgment. When all is said and done, your name is most likely Cloud. We all come from clouds, so we might as well answer to our place of origin. We might as well call to each other to come home, come home, your dinner's getting cold.

You don't own what you don't know, so how can you stop these sentences? You stop them with either a phase or a phrase. You stop them with your false name. You stop them when you are ready to start. If modern studies reveal several mysteries, then you must be ancient. You must be a hot and bright star in the center of a nebula. You must lose first in order to be observed.

I'm wrestling with the pseudonyms. I'm waiting for the alias. I'm watching a cloud float by, creating meaning out of what is suspended. I will be observed, I will not be classified, I will rise.

offshore

I speak Writerese like a native Writerese. I say I am working on my novel and that I have writer's block and that I can't work at night because I get too depressed and would you mind reading over my manuscript? And can we sit quietly, broodingly in a cafe together with our Moleskines and Precise V5 extra fine rolling ball pens? And how is the weather today. Am I going insane. What's the point of the period if it doesn't end this life sentence of being a word slinger.

So I guess there's culture shock. The self and the words are intertwined, inseparable. To the unsuspecting eye, I pass myself off as a native. But in my eyes, the written, printed, and published page is foreign. We are apart -- seas apart -- continents drifting, but never touching. I sail around in this literary canoe with a leak. I send a few distress signals, halfheartedly, but instead decide to sit outside of the boat and float in the abstract.

All I want is to bite into a peach and let it leave nectar on my lips. All I want is for my words to be peaches, not flotation devices. But where can I buy a peach in a country like this? The exchange rate is so poor. I may speak your language, but I'll never eat your fruit.

cord

Lying on my back, the sky looks like a habitat for seahorses. Lying on my stomach, the grass grows galaxies. Lying to myself, I say I don't need either. The truth, however, is that if I don't swim in this space, I will drown daily. If I don't have dirt under my nails by the time I crawl into my own flower bed, then I have failed.

I have plans to seduce you. First I'll take your celestial body out to dinner. If all goes well with our feast of moon cheese and moon Merlot, I'll invite you down to my place while I slip into something more comfortable. But I know I know I know, you go ahead and stay up there. You are solitary by nature and I am, too. We'll keep our dark sides hidden. Your returning glow is good enough for me.

So I stay here. This is my place. I sink into the sky and rise through the soil, all the while remaining attached to an umbilical cord of stories and myths I've been knitting throughout my life. My connection could hold up mountains.

Let my hands continually listen to the heartbeat of the land.

thread

Trapped in the amber is proof that spider webs have existed for at least 100 million years. 36,500,000,000 days of spinning silk and building traps and healing wounds. Each spider should have a diploma on the wall of their office in an architectural firm. I can't even assemble a coffee maker. And if I don't have my coffee, how am I supposed to clear out my morning cobwebs?

Their silk protects their bodies. Their silk protects their eggs. Their silk serves as a signal, as a guide. I envy the threads that sustain them and lead them back home. I search for my own line, but get trapped in the blank spaces I know I am supposed to fill, but don't have the material. Sometimes I scribble in a panic just to prove an existence. Sometimes I erase to evoke a mood. Sometimes I sit out the game and let the others hit home runs.

They will use their own body for measurements while creating their web. The gaps between objects cannot be crossed by crawling. They overcome this by producing a thin adhesive thread which drifts on a breeze across the gap. They will feel the change in the vibration when the thread sticks to the far end. Reeling in and tightening this delicate line, they can walk along it and strengthen it with a second thread.

I can't convince myself to stay in a web that is not my own. I will wander around until I feel the pull of my own home. I will cross that gap when my bridge has been built. I don't need instructions for the assembly, I only need the vibrations.