1. Convective Conditions 

 

No, no, I insist. It’s not insomnia; it’s just my chronotype. By night, sleep comes only in microbursts, short gusts of rest. I sink and I spread, evaporating as I drop. My mouth goes dry, the sweat of my brow a crystal crown. Sleeping pills slay my nightmares but also murder my dreams. Straight-line winds flatten the cornstalks, knock down silos, blow the tiles off rooftops. I do my best to keep the damage contained, but nocturnality is its own special curse. This is what it is to live with lightning and randomness, to be Thor’s target practice, a refugee from daylight, seeking the comfort of the stars; I miss them so, I feel like all I do is write hymns to them. The thunderstorm is decaying around me and I will chase it into oblivion.

 

2. Some Secret Third Thing 

 

When they talk about one and two, I am always the secret third thing. We used to call those “mysteries.” We used to call them “none of the above.” I am neither awake nor asleep, O Buddha, I am neither wise nor foolish. I am neither the answer nor the riddle, neither cowardly nor brave. We’ve come for your binary, Chuck, we not of the living nor of the dead, neither created nor destroyed. Behold the spectrum: the radiant gradient, the grayscale awakened, the back end of forever, the mongrel truth. I am neither Batman nor the Joker, neither good nor horrid, neither master nor student. I am brawling, love, I am misshapen chaos; priestess of the forbidden, vanishing point of the horizon, realm between realms, dreamless dreamer, photobombing ghost, the sweetest demon, aspect of the uncommon, a whole fragment. There are more maybes than there are noes and yeses. There is more becoming than there is its past tense. They give us more boxes than options and I am unchosen and ticked off and some secret third thing which as yet remains nameless. 

 

3. Object Permanence

 

He still wears the scarf I crocheted for him twenty years ago, so pilled and worn now, you can no longer see the stitches. This knot we tied no longer belongs to us. It has eclipsed us, taken on a life of its own, product of this score of winters, of winding and unwinding, of handwashing in the sink. Neither of us has been able to hold onto our wedding rings. He’s had two and I’ve had at least four. He was allergic to metals and I guess I’m just bad at owning things. Which is just as well. Loss illustrates the impermanence of it all. How many coats has this scarf been paired with, I wonder, how much snow and rain has soaked into its fibers? How many days spent garlanding his throat? I don’t remember how long it took for me to make it, only dim recollections of evenings and weekends spent with wool and hook. Was it for Christmas or just because? A marriage is a country where only two people speak the language, and I had no thoughts of fashioning its flag, of weaving a living artifact. May it be a comfort to us in our time of exile. 

 

4. Demiurge

 

There is no One. We are many. You are many. Infinite variation. A menagerie of gods. (There are makers and materials, but who made the makers and the materials?) All we think we know is this blue world, a reality of bones and saltwater, ambergris and serotonin. We long to return to the unknown source, a place that only our dream selves know. Yet we inhabit multiple planes of existence, all at once. It’s the only way for us to contain all that we contain. It’s the only way to have such manifold aspects. It reads to you as divine, like Christ’s doings, but you, too, are divine. This is what is meant by the Trinity, the seemingly contradictory existence of God/father, man/son, carpenter/king in the same vessel, a virgin mother, a holy cup, supernova remnants, sentient dust. The color blue is both celestial and terrestrial. The beginning is the ending is the beginning. God is the word made flesh. You are the flesh and the world. God is a cosmic whale fall and we are standing together in His carcass. Are you ready to feed?

 

5. Formal Operational Stage

 

I remember the precise moment of epiphany: second grade, Sister Virginia had taken us for a bathroom break and I was just getting back in line, having tended to my inputs and outputs, and the light was breaking through the windows like a yellow-white ocean wave, splashing along the floor tiles, and realizing that I was me, that I was in possession of this body, that this was now, the day the Lord has made. That I was me and everybody else was everybody else, and those were my feet growing warm in their saddle oxfords, in the glare of the sun-tide, in this city, in this state, on God’s green Earth. This is how men and angels fall, when you figure out that the emperor is naked, that the fruit is sweet, that one day, everyone and everything you love will be gone. Learning that we reside in this fragile home whose upkeep consumes our days, this tool of varied usefulness, this lethal weapon, this dopamine palace, this harbinger of scriptures yet unwritten.