All that shifts in the night is silence and smoke. ‘I want to show you something,’ she says. Placing my hand in hers, she lays them on the counter, placid. The smoke coils, dancing between us. Countless molecules shimmer, cavort, and graze upon their fabric. The air warms, its crisp brace shredded in a still kinetic bath. She raises her hand and one hundred trillion atoms are suddenly meagre, they burst and multiply, flitter and merge, shouting joyously across an indefinable space. ‘Can you see it,’ she asks. I tell her, I can feel it. Suddenly everything is different.
Waking might be the end of me. It’s the moment a balloon breaks, slowed to a handful of agonising frames. Stretched beyond the tenable, then shredded by tension, a normally elastic composure separates into disparate shards. If you pause in that moment you lose all catharsis, it becomes the overwhelming evisceration of one element over another, pressure versus restraint, but if you press forward you lose both forces. One freed by its molecules, one bound by them, equally stripped of purpose by form, one dissipates and the other dies. All of this happens before I even open my eyes.
A Few Short Words 