Sublime

I know the foolishness of wanting to find here anything more than dust and mold and broken, abandoned things. And yet, I touched the edge of the bed in the room where Cy slept. Touched the dust on the shelf of Tatia’s bookshelf. Touched the holes in the wall, those spaces where nails tacked canvas. “The desire to touch,” writes John Berger, “is,

But time became confused in her memory, like a tangled string. The straight-line axis was lost, and forward and back, right and left, jumbled together. One drawer took the place of another.

(Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish

I imagine, that during that period the Shades, or at least John Shade, experienced a sensation of odd instability as if parts of the everyday, smoothly running world had got unscrewed, and you became aware that one of your tires was rolling beside you, or that your steering wheel had come off.