The manner of things

The sidewalk glittered like rain catching a perfect angle of light, poetic and picturesque, multiplied annoying by millions. And, of course, every single sparkle was its own, unique. Something on the verge of singular.

The museum had closed hours ago, but that didn’t stop the convergence that happened there. Lines, circles and squares. Colors that pretended to be shapes, but could never be anything but pigment, derived from crushed minerals, mixed in a spot of medium to make them stay.

And they stayed and stayed. They lived in different places, displaced from their natural environments. Haphazard brushstrokes forced them to exist on the coarse woven fibers of canvass, wood, and smooth, smooth glass. They vibrated against the arrangement and broadcast help messages, each in their own language.

They cried out in blue and red and yellow. They all cried out all the time and as a result, their voices became muddled in black. Their frequencies stretched out into an infinite complexity of mystery, for no one really knows what happens in black.

The moon laughed and rocked at the noise that came at and surrounded the poor beast. A long time ago, she had tried to care, bend her ear attentively, the cries like pennies skipping across train tracks. But there were too many pennies to gather, and her arms and legs and mouth and every crevice was full with pennies. Without respite.

As a result, she spun with her mouth open, gurgling out laughter in between the pennies that still shifted there, clanging against each other, fighting to find their own voice, not realizing they already had it.

Trying to be singular, like raindrops or glittering sidewalks.

The moon talked, too, streaming down through the museum window as a flow of monosyllabic utterances; more beautiful than grunts but less so than a bundle of horsehairs trembling across sinew.

And the museum window heard a different sound than what the moon originally produced. The window was a clear membrane and had the distinct disadvantage of perceiving both inside and out, and knew enough of the wind and rain, the dust and particulate matter floating through the air to be certain of nothing. How could the moon sound like the moon through the billions of filters that hindered the sound’s flight from there to here? How could anything be original in all that humming ecstasy?

On nights bleeding with violent song, the window shuddered in the confines of its frame, wishing to be soft and able to fold into itself. But it had seen this happen once before: the wishing for something so hard that the wisher imitated a cat curling into itself for a tranquil moment of self-induced peace.

The window groaned with the weight of the wish and with the trying. It realized its error after a fatal crack burst from the center. It was a brittle thing.

And brittle can be different things. A state of being. A quality. A characteristic. No one is really sure of the origins of brittle, only that it is as hard as it is delicate. Indeed, maybe its hardness informs its delicate, precarious existence.

But being brittle and being hard are not synonymous. Hard is not fragile like brittle. She prefers it that way. Hard likes to think herself the antithesis of soft. Not in a maniacal way, like the devil is the antithesis of God. Nothing that dramatic or polarized.

Hard and the window understood each other in the only way things of different natures can understand the other. Through similarity. Hard saw some of herself in the window, indeed, even in the moon and in the colors, the arrangement of the colors and the places they lived. But Hard saw that others understood her only in the places they intersected.

She scoffed when others equated her with a relativistic line, which they claimed held her purest form on one end and soft at the opposing end. During discussions of her heart and nature, she wished to not be understood at all.

She sought out the colors during these trying times and relished in their self-absorbed cries for help. They did not try to analyze her. They only cared about her insofar as her ability to help them.

They didn’t realize she was part of them and if they only asked, she would have give them a different point of view regarding their existence. A point of view they might take consolation in.

Lines, particles expressing, becoming lines, becoming circles and squares and other manners of shapes.

The squares were all angles and hard hard corners. It was impossible to imagine any softness there. But the floors were empty and the school children had left with their noses running, thick with snot, thick with mucus, which was thick with contagions. Soft waxy crayon bled all over the floor and the sky rumbled like a demolition derby. The dolls would not play here for fear of the black horizon and the dogs howled at the night that was too early. I felt it only yesterday, like A major on my skin, strong and solid. Buoyant. But there were other mysteries to unfold and refold like an old blanket taken out for houseguests and nothing else.

Black.