Tamara K. Walker
No Continuity
I’m a caffeine addict impelled to breathe through a mass-market coffee filter. The alarm goes off, telling me it’s time to sleep, and I’m not the same person at my pm am rising perpetually unhatched from the starchy mangled linen, (like everyone else everyone is like that but not), with the defiant stucco skin I want to sand down permanently instead of painting languid layers of light and varnish over and the occasional 30-second heart-bleaching priapism and mainly this holographic face of a hydrophobic retroactive fatalist.
Irreality is my reality complete with the negligent malevolence of society that everyone else plays for novelty to make a hollow existential point that I manifest flesh.
I’m only you and never you at once.
My oxygen tanks are depleting, gradually and as rapidly as this peach would disintegrate if I hurled it into space, and I’m very unwise, but at least I’m wise enough to see the rubber tubes emanating from the craters of every nerve ending that is not supposed to exist. I’m glass but not the beautiful kind, most of the time. I’m the haphazard pile of loose shards lying on top of the finished mosaic only after it’s been cemented and dipped in liquid nitrogen. There is as little continuity between the asymmetrical spectacles through which I see the world seeing me as there is in a box of vinyl gloves with all but one glove missing. Time blurs into itself like tropical rain on ice, which also happens to be my favorite beverage. I will take my oxygen in liquid form from here on out. Yet my gorgeous gluttonous gills are obstinately nonexistent, except for the unendingly fledgling/dying row forever forming and foaming behind my left ear. Make of that what you will. Make of nothing what you will, for it is only nothing that births embryos and awaits permanently (un)spectacular endings. Nothing is continuous and nothing is continuous. Don’t be a cosmic armadillo unless you really require it, they say, and then disparage those who do like Cincinnatus C. inexplicably scheduled for a blank beheading. To be a cosmic armored armadillo is all that I request of the world, most minutes, but then again, my infinite requests and finite expectations are divergent in a crystallized waterfall of nitrogen gas and sun tea unfit for human consumption.
Emotional Esperanto, if it existed, would be subject to the same constraints, nostalgic failures and criticisms of Esperanto as it actually currently exists. This is the kind of sobering reality I want to swing an icepick at repeatedly in futile anger. I sustained fewer injuries torpedoing the shadows of diamond platitudes that suffocated all the prism miners. Instead, I gently lift the antagonistic sticky lattice of sponge cake formed of all the fuzzy sets that my antiworker bees have accumulated, feel its questionably dormant lightness and set it down gently on the moist knoll above the mine.
I was only once you and always you always.
I will be supremely accessible and forever unavailable for a limited time only.
If you don’t feel like waiting that long, I better start brewing solar tisanes.
If I don’t feel like waiting that long, you better make some coffee.
Lens
1. It starts with you
You are not a paltry replica of your own razor shadow. You are subterranean and the particles under Everyone’s systemic fingernail, but do not think for a suspended moment that you are dirty–unless you intend to invoke the soiled implications of nutrients, found fertility and spongy mutable support for growths to live and for life to take hold. Your ephemerality of form is an asset; it enables you to transcend instrumental purpose and surf signifiers unencumbered by their better halves. We will need this to accomplish our aims—but fear not, there will be no shortsighted attempt to confine you into a tool of even the most nondescript and versatile variety. We require understanding. You understand: our need for understanding, your capacity to understand (both this need and in general), and perhaps least importantly (although, in these times, one can never accurately predict importance), how to acquire understanding of the phenomena we require acquiring understanding about. There will be flickers of sudden light in the course of our investigation. Please, try to prevent yourself from partially evaporating in these and most other instances. Mist, while indisputably useful for attaining a superficial and varied knowledge of the immediate environment, will not coalesce cohesively enough to be truly helpful here.
2. Eye perceive therefore I am
I recently completed a set of instructions for myself in second person, which brings me great tranquil comfort to write in. I’m trying to absorb a greater sense of self-presence in all things, both conceptual and tangible. I appear to speak in analogical riddles, but my definitions are in reality very literal. Life is a holographic rainbow of scattered clarity, sterile light without flaws, and I exist in the interstices of contrast between myself and the pure, peaceful, blue-sky realms I perpetually inhabit. This has been even more the case since I had one of my eyes replaced by a spherical compound eye, like an insect. The visual mosaic is better reflective of my personality, I think, and my motion detection is vastly improved. The only negative side effects, so far, seem to consist of periodic headaches and a diminished ability to focus. My instructions are adequate.
I have to do this. Not merely because it’s the culmination of everything I have worked for and walked towards in my brief yet eternal life, which it is, but for far more indefinite and imperative reasons which elude description by their very nature (which is, of course, impossible to describe). I have to assume that the images and information filtered through my consciousness are intrinsically relevant to these purposes that simultaneously compel and distort me. Everything exacerbates what it exasperates in an organic repetitive cycle. If I am to thrive and not merely survive, I must do this, although I cannot guarantee that it is not vital to my own survival. These are my motives, upfront and without saccharine obfuscation. We aspire to provide a composite justification, based upon an admittedly loose but lucid link of our individual needs and backgrounds. Manifestos are forthcoming.
3. She is, she discovered, she won’t
What follows are equally factual recounts of events and plausible speculations. Don’t make any more assumptions. Until you can be properly trusted to integrate fact and fiction in a way that blurs both, I have to spoonfeed you the necessary intelligence from a spork.
She mocks coarse sand and excessive adverbs, but those details are likely irrelevant in the long run. Metamorphosis itself interests her, but more from the perspective of potential accomplishment than ability. There is a difference, she insists. She dips herself in water, penetrating her own reflection, and creates the world she sees in real-time from cakes of chalky settled pigment. She surveils herself to prepare for what she’s going to do, preferring to use closed-circuit television and telescopes. She must do this, what she meticulously prepares for, in order to account for and explain the stability of her contemporary existence. She is a deliberately irresponsible accountant, as debt is meaningless to one who seesaws tetradimensionally on the precipice of time.
At some point, she ended up solidly instantiated here, an intransigent amalgamation of paths past, present, and future. She is as much a worker bee, nondescript and dependent upon the colony for survival, as she is a betta, vividly distinguished and needing isolation. This makes her vulnerable, but she is fully aware of and cherishes this vulnerability. All she really remembers (and misses) from the past is the ethereality, the quality that did not know liberation for it never required it. She will therefore channel these memories and transform once more, into an infamous temporary celebrity whose muted visage is more shocking than what she’s accused of. The silver flashes of ambitious photographers will go off, and she will dissolve in bursts into the razor shadows that she, I, and you are not, at least not merely, paltry replicas of.
Tamara K. Walker is a serial underachiever who dreams of irrealities among typewriter ribbons, stuffed animals, pills and fuchsia lipstick. She lives in Colorado and can be found online at http://tamarakwalker.wordpress.com as well as http://about.me/tamara.kwalker. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cafe Irreal, A cappella Zoo, The Conium Review, Melusine, Identity Theory, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Gay Flash Fiction, and a handful of themed print anthologies published by Kind of a Hurricane Press, among others.
