Askew With Disproportionate Lore

Deeply into November 2000

I’m writing to you.
Your letter—the one I only now managed to pick up…

The moment I touched that paper, I felt the Earth’s honest tilt of about 23.44° experience a microdegree’s adjustment — astronomically tiny, climatologically negligible — 0.000001°. I waited with the opening, as if with its coming, applience was demanded, and what would happen then? Would desert drink rain, oceans flourish in the grey cities, and our shadows would forget to fall and instead would just walk wherever they please? Once I opened four corners of that revealing of your universe of “worried” questions, the time had folded over itself and one couldn’t tell where the beginning was, so I simply tilted my head to the right (I know you do that too, but not sure to which side — I try to picture you and still don’t know, is it left or right?) as… to read it carefully, to… write.

So, we here, a hairline change in the angle tilt, at the destructive/uplifting danger of creation…

You write and there is an asking if twenty-three-and-a-half could shift slightly and become the global warming temperature with stability, which we would appreciate, indeed. Instead, we suddenly realise a different facet of one’s face insistently revealed.

Not only that, the interior of that habitat…

Not only that, in your letter, there is important knowledge, burdensome knowledge, the kind no one should hold, the kind that makes its keeper responsible simply by knowing, the kind you cannot unknow once it presses itself into you with the tenderness of a bruise. You, of all people who are no one (no one’s, not even once), hovering around in thoughtlessness, default mode. You write of the impossibility of the possible, really. Knowledge is never innocent … it carries consequences. Once you know it, it shapes the world of yours, and once forced into a knowing, it connects the known and the knower in a way that cannot be undone, unshaped, or unconnected. And so we cannot ever possess what’s newly learnt, but only carry a burden: the knowing that points in two directions — toward what is known, and toward whoever knows it. And so, we do well to pause before gaining more, to realise that new understanding can become a fragile, living thing, half-believed, half-fearing to be released. It is not enough to hide it or share it: once it has touched you, it will press all around and crouch over you.

Crista Uwase, Regal, 2018

So, I absorbed what I could, dropped with impetus to the floor another remaining ton of it, and so consequently, the butterflies are already flying calmly now, among the tall and mysterious grasses that will never be cut and grow even taller, though unknown if they will produce any fruit. My latest story I sent you was a little different from what I wrote earlier, maybe because I completely forgot myself on another side of consciousness or maybe because I am a little Creature… I don’t know what’s real anymore, and I have a feeling this impression might come back to me in years to come; It hasn’t stopped mattering to me, though it feels eerily like it has. Everything seems to have grown soft-edged, indifferent to me. I should be glad, and sometimes I am. Nothing has become ordinary—it has simply become other. And so I asked about habit, because I don’t know whether what I feel is too complicated to describe or too trivial to admit—sarcasm, apathy, quiet cruelties I never commit.

What was supposed to happen after the blue letter? It wasn’t spite. There was truth there—truth tangled with my illusions. Sometimes I believed in it entirely; sometimes I contradicted it violently.

As for daily life, I don’t love it entirely, not as it is now. The world keeps functioning just enough to pass as functional. And the smuggling exhausts us more than the work ever could. Though sometimes, like you, I adore what I do. I suppose one simply does not possess a right to openly express a bone-deep disdain for the banal structures that supposedly sustain us and simply “like” each and every life’s facades. Overall, everydayness feels hostile, as if it conspires to wear me down, and only a foolish approach would be to ask if that’s good or bad. Rightfully or cruelly — that's what perhaps you would ask. Or if you already know, you would say with steal cold eyes: Indeed.

Before I end, let me give you something: the memory of future events that will never happen. For now, trust your own dreams of a gentler creature; perhaps your dreaming may one day summon her into being. Perhaps. May it be so. And yet—you know how contradiction is my second nature—so I also hope you don’t let go entirely.

Every day I pass the train —that train—and it cracks my heart like forbidden chocolate, so sweet, so unreachable. Sometimes I think I would board it alone, just to see where it goes. But life insists on itself, so I keep walking.

So here is my goodbye—bright, exaggerated—until the next false greeting.

T. A. Alienne

Of course, you may sign yourself with that expression of yours, a costume, one of many you hold. How many are there? Will you let me see your wardrobe?

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Petite

If I could write poems —
truly, not like this one —
I would surely write you
a letter, plainly addressed WXZ.
On the back — the sender: “a person from another dimension,”
and inside the envelope would be
a blank sheet of blue.

1997

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