heart point

summertime, the cyclicality of life, and black holes.

Cor ne edito — Pythagoras

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It’s waking up past noon, speaking to no one, sitting in the sun for long enough to feel sick, then laying on the couch and drifting in and out of consciousness until it’s time to go to bed and do it all over again. Happy summer, baby. The days of the week change but I think it’s always the same day. Sleeping is as close to dying as it’ll ever be— the washing of the body, the white shroud of sheets, the way sweat acts as embalming fluid. Heat death is for more than just the planet, I guess. I wake up and my grandmother is in the hospital again. I wake up and Shelley Duvall is dead. I wake up and someone has tried to assassinate Trump. I’m waiting for some sort of news to come in, a funeral invite or sympathetic call. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. It could happen to anyone.

To speak plainly, it’s hot— not hot enough to cook an egg on a car or sidewalk with any sort of haste, but hot enough that I’m never free from the rattle of box fans— and the maggots are back in the compost bin again. I’ve developed a habit of starting my morning by walking into the little alcove where we keep our garbage and opening the lid to stare at them. It’s normal to wish for transformation during the summer; I think it’d be nice to be a maggot. I like the way their bodies look, so small and pale and hungry, the promise of transformation. And what an important creature to be, right? Decomposers are more vital than ever in our impossible plastic world. You could help everything make the leap between “alive” and “dead”, sitting in the damp heat and spending your little blind life pushing the whole world over the edge. It’s about usefulness. The devil can’t make work for your idle hands if you simply don’t have hands.

Time has gotten sludgy and disjointed. My relationship with tidiness changes from a habit into something I crave but can never fulfill. The ugly part about living in an old house is that nothing ever gets clean, not really. I have dreams about using everything possible, bleach and tiny scrub brushes and ripping up flooring, to scrub every speck of dirt out of this place. Everything smells like clover. Did I fall asleep on the lawn again? Have I been dreaming this whole time? The summer is not an intellectual season— it relies entirely on sensations, of smells and textures and blurs of colors through sheer curtains. They haven’t invented words that can properly express the slow-moving muck of the hours, the dusty smell of the blackberries my father came home from work with, the way the trees throw their long necks back into the sky. The air is heady with hot pine. The tar smell of the asphalt has begun to bloom, unfurling until it’s taller than any living thing, so tall that you’d need to climb a skyscraper to escape it. The wind never gets deep enough into the buildings to make a difference in the temperature.

In a place that isn’t here, the cicadas have started to howl, the never-ending scream-scrape of their voices joining in a desperate chorus, one over the other over the other. I’m sure I was there once. Maybe it was also a dream. There’s a good chance I’m still laying in the grass with all the other bugs. It’s hard to be sure of anything when the world keeps coming in and out of focus with the sunlight. Even through closed eyes you can see the ripple of shadows across your eyelids, like a memory is moving in front of you. If you drive fast enough you can catch it. If you can step into the water of that heat mirage you’ll be there.

Something is within my sight but not quite within my reach. The sun goes down. I finally wake up.

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Everything follows the breath. I don’t remember who told me that, but it’s stuck with me for years now, calcifying into a metamorphic slab of push and pull. It partially means that we as people are impossibly influenced by the air we breathe and how we breathe it; it mostly means all the things that constitute life are made of constant contraction and expansion. The nature of the world is cyclical. There will always be a moment of inhalation that builds and a moment of exhalation that releases. It almost works as a way to check in with yourself— what are you holding onto? What are you letting go of? How much can you pull into yourself before your soul gets crowded and how much of yourself can you abandon before you become just the memory of a person? Where do you stop? Can you stop? Do you know how? Are you getting crushed by your own ribs?

There’s balance in that, too. I have to assume there is, because one moment I feel like I’m clinging onto a life that’s three sizes too small, and the next I feel like I’m casting aside things that I shouldn’t be casting aside. Inside the larger cycle is a smaller one, I guess. It gets a little polyrhythmic. But the big problem here is that I’m helping my life shrink. I want it to happen. I get the sense that this is a bottleneck effect of sorts, that I’m narrowing down the things I’m bringing into my future, but there’s a reason that bottlenecks are heavily linked to extinction.

Have I carved enough, my Lord? Child, you are a bone.¹ Don’t we always end up here?

Obviously I’m a liar. Obviously. Nobody can go this far into themselves willingly— it takes a salesman or a lawyer or a politician to go this deep. Seduction and false promises are required. It’s perfectly okay, because the self-obsession necessary to drag yourself on a downward spiral like this happens to almost everyone at one point or another, even if it’s just because it feels good to take a beating you think you deserve. It’s okay and normal and it’s so delicious to keep curling inwards. Sure, abandon the outside world. Why not? There’s nothing for me out there right now. To some extent that’s true, but obviously, I’m a liar. (Note: truth is also cyclical— most truths are built on a foundation that lies put down, and all lies have a grain of truth in there somewhere. Throughout the history of mankind, they’ve become so thoroughly entangled it’s impossible to know where one starts and one stops). There’s layers to my isolation, because there always is, layers of disability and intolerance and the psychological bullshit I’ve had tucked away for such a long time that I no longer remember how to get it out. None of it changes the fact that no matter how much I want it, it isn’t good for me, and if it is good for me, then something is really wrong with my head. Besides being a liar. A good liar, at that. I think I reached the “unreliable narrator” point of denial and then went a little further, to be honest.

Whatever, though. Doesn’t matter. I think I have a psych evaluation scheduled for sometime next month. I’m curious to see if I’ll learn how to tell the truth by then.

And I swear to God my life is good. It really, truly is. I have pretty much everything I could possibly need. I’m always happy— I’m always so, so happy, so glad to be alive, so placid. Even though I’m probably curled so far inwards that it’s borderline autocannibalism at this point and my heart feels bad without feeling bad and I’ve never met someone who knows how to play the game I’m playing, I’ve still never been anything but perfectly serene. And a liar, obviously. I still can’t tell exactly what I’m lying about, but I know that I’m definitely lying to myself about something.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe out. Breathe out again. There’s only so far we can go in either direction before it gets painful— the tightness in the throat and chest when inhaling, the press of the ribs when exhaling— and eventually, if we keep it up, we die from asphyxiation. The body wants to stay alive, so it does a good job of stopping this from happening, but one could still theoretically die from refusing to succumb to balance.

Basically, it’s okay. My body will keep me alive, even though it’s trying to kill me, so it’s totally okay. It’s fine. And obviously— obviously— I’m a liar.

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A couple months ago, the Aurora Borealis visited my backyard. It is possible for something to be underwhelming and transcendental at the same time? I laid out on the grass, sober and so nauseous I was shaking, and saw nothing when I looked at the sky except slight discoloration. Absolutely fuck all. There was no direction I could angle my body where a streetlight wouldn’t obstruct my view by shining directly into my eyes. For a moment there I was a kid again, face down on a football field at night, drowning in the floodlights, and then the feeling left and I was staring into present-day light pollution again. I was smaller than I’ve ever been, beyond molecular, subatomic, and so heavy that I almost made myself a fresh grave just by touching the ground.

Do you know how black holes are made? Imagine a three dimensional grid plane— I’m talking x axis, y axis, z axis— and then a single point on that plane. Not a ray or a line or a segment, a point. I’ve been devoted to the idea of the point ever since I learned about them. Technically, even encroaching the slightest bit in any direction would make a point no longer qualify as a point. If it’s anything but perfectly symmetrical, it becomes some type of line, and if it extends in all directions, it’s a circle, which is different from a point because it covers space and a true point occupies zero dimensions. Symmetrical isn’t even the right word because a point is an existing nonexistence and therefore can’t have any traits at all. In mathematical drawings, we use filled-in circles to represent the point because it’s physically impossible to create an accurate representation, even with the power of a computer. A point is the center of a center and even when you’re inside the center, you can always get more central.

Now, imagine a weight is dropped on this non-thing, warping the graph and creating a three dimensional bell curve. Anything within the slope of the bell curve is pulled to the bottom of it. This is the mathematical basis for a black hole. Now imagine the point itself is the weight, so small that nothing falls into the vacuum but itself. This is the mathematical basis for myself.

I was a kid in the light for a chronological point, then I became a point, then I became the tiniest black hole in the world. My gravity didn’t even reach the tips of my fingers— it was just my heart and that secret grief, hurtling through miles and miles of dirt and bedrock and magma until it was vaporized into an even more nonexistent state of nonexistence by the core of the Earth. It wasn’t my body anymore. It wasn’t my mind that was thinking. It wasn’t my eyes that were knowing I was looking at something, even though I couldn’t see it. It was just a dream I had. Even in May, I could smell the beginnings of the clover. The ground was wet. I was inside it. Somewhere but not here, there was warmth. Somewhere but not here, I’m sure there’s cicada song.

By the time I went inside, it was almost 4 a.m., I had dozens of raspberry-lime photos on my phone, and I could believe in anything, anything at all. It’s my greatest gift and it’s probably going to kill me. Them’s the digs. It happens to us all, maggots and presidential candidates alike.

I’m still on the lawn. Seriously— I’m on the lawn right now, because there’s nothing else for me to do but sit on the grass and do nothing. Maybe I’m asleep. It’s hard to tell. The sun went down hours ago, my eyes finally opened, and everything just got real fucking sharp all the sudden. The Aurora is long gone by now, but when you look at the sky, you’re never staring into empty space. Empty space doesn’t exist. The stars are always there, even if you can’t see them for some reason. And we’ll never see all the stars at once ever again, not with how the world is today, but they’re there. I mean, we think they’re there. We can almost never prove the existence of the things that are beyond our visual and comprehensive powers, so there’s a chance they might not exist at all. Faith slips out of our hands all the time. It’s just how life goes.

You know, I might be a liar, but I’m a hopeful liar. For all of our sakes, I hope you are too.

1. From Leonard Cohen’s Teachers.