Comma

It's hard to begin, because even before beginning i ask the question, how should i begin? Usually i'm self-conscious about beginning with the singular first-person pronoun because it sponges importance in its columnar etchedness. It assumes there is a ceiling and a floor, a crust and a welkin between which it exists, like a passerelle. So i thought then to begin with this beginning and to each time i write the passerelle to stop, almost like a quiet stun where i can nearly feel the distance between my right middle finger and the black concave surface of the key it presses upon a second later.

It's curious i'm speaking of personal pronouns, because the i i am is riddled with gladwrap, so much so that i feel cocooned in between words and supposings, and by that i mean whatever fills the non-air around my cranium and the crania of others when we're in a room, sounding out verbatia. It's as if we come into a classroom, we position ourselves with elbows on tables and become pumps of cloud. And as we talk, as we lesson, or "learn," the air becomes progressively more misty in a deceptive fashion, because i can still see you and you can still see me and my lips moving. But the air has changed and what i thought i was outside that room has now been lost among powdered thoughts that we mortared.

i want to talk about you. i and you, and why you have three letters and i only one, but mine is normally assumed to be the one that's more important. i'd really become someone else, that is, someone next to myself, when i was I, for i thought myself taller than i was. But i freed myself from the gladwrap after enough sweating inside. And that's to say that you helped me by cutting it, so that i could wriggle out, wormy and digested, but still intact, that is, newborn. Preserved. Pre-served: what i was before i made myself into someone, a human capitalised worm.

i was thinking about who you are and graduation and the yam with the trencher that you drew. And if i were still cocooned, I would have felt envious at being shown such appreciation, at having affection articulated. And I would have felt angry, furious at my inability to nudge and create something wonderful, like you did. I would have thrashed, and maybe fallen off from the nook where I'd been spidered. I would've broken something, like a tooth, or a promise.

and i got to thinking about the blog post you'd written, that you'd addressed to you, and my not being sure who you really was. i wanted to think it was me, and then i thought about one of your friends who it could have been. and then you replied to my text and i thought i shouldn't ask you who it was, though i wanted to know.

i wanted it to be me.
or I wanted it to be me.

but what do i want, now that i've slalomed out of the slithering confusion of columnar self and atlassed self (the i, visually, is like Atlas holding up the firmament, or a globe) and found myself again, mapped here, at the co-ordinates 0, 0.

i don't need it to be me, that you that you wrote while in your midnight high.

and while i can still feel the wiggling thoughts squirming in my crenelations (cranium-elations), i feel a sense of freedom to let them fidget and turn. i'm happy, you know. drawing brackets around this moment is probably the best thing we decided to do. and for that, i thank you. because i know that between these two concave dividers, i can meet you. we set out a place, and on any map that is where i can find you: at (0, 0).

i want to give you words,
better approximations each time
hopingly
but probably,
probably you know too, this,
that we may get closer,
which is where we're meant to get with words,
maybe,
but we'll never quite find our way
to where x meets y
that chromosomal parenthetical
birthplace.

maybe we'll set
(here's an idea)
our hooks in the water
(are there fish)
and take no anchors,
just drift
ice floats with a beanie, a nose,
and take over the word
by sea.

we could wave
in all sorts of languages
and all sorts of inscriptions,
and there's something funny and tragic about how each time something is said that sounds true,
there's a visceral embrace,
and then when it's said again,
i am looking at it across something,
a sea, 
or nothing, but there's a distance.

it gets abstract and polysyndetonic
and troubled, in the French sense.

then after words, 
we're different,
though we find ourselves at (0, 0) 
once again,
and we realise
it's you and i
i and you
you, i
i, you
(0, 0)
like we've been reset. and then we notice the comma between us, and i or you ask you or me whether we've been using that as a cane or a contact lens. then we think ourselves as circles and ends to things, and precisely not venn diagrams. then we're thinking about it too much, because it gets nebulous, so we stop again. there is still this comma between us, an orthographical sign, one that you and i have both internalised. i'm thinking of it as the worm, or the remnant of the worm, the thought there in the space, between the parentheses, the thought that takes us outside our dividers. the thought that we leave there as an escape route. maybe it's mine - i feel some responsibility for it. but i venture you would say the same thing, because there are thoughts in your mind, too, niggling, wiggling and making you pause. so it's mine, and it's yours, so it's ours. 

it's good we can see it. i want to end this. so i will end it. i say it's good we can see it, because it's written, and it's material, and it's a change in intonation, so it's discernible, visible, visceral, bodily, and it stands outside, permanently outside, though internalised by us. it remains outside. although we've brought it in, and used it as a tool, and are still using it as a tool (whether we've wrung it into a word, or a letter, or an excuse, or a joke), it's not of us. it's ours - we anvilled it into a speck from what it was, or from what it really is, and put it between us. and although sometimes it angers me, when it's a leech or a seaweed, sometimes it helps me see, like when it's a looking glass, or the branches of a tree.

or a pier, or a cupcake, saved.