Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me. I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again. I try to skip rocks. I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang. I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am. If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.
Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink. One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud. The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship. Found. Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash! Mid-river. The current continues. I can't see my face, looking down. The angles aren't right. The light is not just so. The sun is not cooperating. Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.
Thinking about how people find their perfect match. At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me. Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic. Impossible. Incredible in its perfection and destruction. Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist. Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.
Happy and satisfied are two different things. The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief. As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true. Doomed. I laugh typing that. The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle. Dooooooomed! Of course not. Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat. I wonder what quantum decay looks like. I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them. Some of them, yes. None of them, also yes. Always at distance. Minding the fence. Minding the facilities. On the off chance they might be me. On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.
A moat. Sometimes the bridge is there. The gates open and ambassadors cross. I don't know what madness is. Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself? Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself? Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere? Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here, this is what I wanted. I am here. This is what I wanted. Few things truly scare me, in life. I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half. Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.
///Groove Armada - "
At The River" ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.
