The past is woven as a tight knot that must be undone to create the new knot of the looser future, the tight knot of the future past that will have to be undone to create its own loose future future and tight future past. But what of all the topographical time that is spent tying and untying, all the time that is really all the time? The rope fraying candles at both ends, and the inevitable snaps occurring when one point bears too much of the stress too much of the time? The fibrous strands of time that make up the coarser strands of time that wind together to become the tendons of the world relaxing and contracting to pull us around the sun and seasons? Waiting for darkness in the darkness through your eyelids, a tinted window against the pulse of the green flashing light you still can’t turn off, because you still can’t find the source. You thought you’d already buried everything, but something is still beating and it has to be in here somewhere. It’s been six months since you ritualised the radio into a smashed mountain of silver bones, red and green guts tangled on the rust stained linoleum kitchen floor. The neighbours complained about the frequency change. Their dogs couldn’t sleep for ecstatic car alarms. You remember how the knots undid in the moment of impact. A sun strikes the side of a skyscraper, refracted filtering down lime green light through sticky plain trees, catching the shining intent of a wet dog paw print in freshly excreted concrete that won’t ever dry quite the same way now, as compared to the imagined present where that tree was never planted and that skyscraper never built and that dog never saw that pigeon. In infinite divisibility everything could be a sundial measuring something, even and especially the somethings that are so precise as to be entirely imperceptible to the naked mind’s eye, the razor point between the hourglass and the pink saliva primordial soup. If you know you know, you know. Squinting to see the grains of the objects filtered through their individual and collective knowledge of their own edges, of small death, big life, accidentally sneaking up on someone you loved and worrying about why they couldn’t sense you, why this is still happening after all this time has fallen. I didn’t mean to scare you, I thought I’d made the air warm enough. You were going to burn the radio, you thought it could be made to be happier, seeping, moist, undifferentiated. But it didn’t feel right enough. After all, we hadn’t burnt the cat when she died, had we? So we buried the former radio shards by the holly tree, next to the former cat, making sure the different bones didn’t touch, yet. Observing all eyes on the beautiful arachnid corpse left to decompose in the hermetically sealed hub within the infrastructure you so carefully manicure, just don’t call it a coping device or a waste management crisis. Hope is the barrier and the prerequisite, nobody would make could if they didn’t think it would work. A dozen eggs of various sizes, so much space for a theory of mind, eggs and hair and nails and the coating on the end of shoelaces, it’s all the same material to someone, that same person who can’t eat grapes because they remind them of eyeballs, somatic associations know a lot more than we think, than grapes see. One night I came home and the TV was gone, along with the ancient yellow computer we used to type things we didn’t care about losing. You tried to look distraught for an appropriate reason and amount of time and told me that we’d been burgled. I pretended not to notice the mound in the garden had grown. It’s not about rustic simplicity. The muscles contract and expand and are left in a cupboard to prove before baking and rise and collapse, it’s fine, really. What is a rural life? Scything is mostly in the hips, it’s a swinging motion, you cut the grass and then swipe it to the side in one motion, like this: swipe, space, mound, swipe, space, mound, swipe, space, mound, until everything is space or mound or or. It rained and you panicked softly the garden was turn into rivers of mud and all your handiwork would be washed away to the wrong places, all the insides expelled, and so you told me everything, where everything was, where everything was going to be and where you actually needed it to be and why. I asked if our printed photos were okay, and you said they were because they had already happened. The light bulbs were in bloom, all fired up sticky iridescence on the verge of obsolescence. There was so much life in the breathless terrarium that sustainability wasn’t even a question, just what sustaining. Vase inside a cabinet inside a room inside a house kind of terrarium, little steps towards ivy and black mould and the perfect amount of mildew, we saw it like somewhere between a few million billion and a few trillion million insects in the world, which is to say we didn’t, and it could remain better that way until it couldn’t. The next day I came home with a broken fax machine I’d found at the end of our street. ‘I hope this is okay, I don’t really understand how this all works yet.’ ‘It’s perfect, thank you. Get the shovel.’ You said it made things the right temperature, for a while, when you could hear the words and images hitting the soil underground, next to the cat, next to the holly.
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