I filled the crib with sand.
I clasped my hands.
This was how the hours went.
The ways went on and days did raze against each other.
I grew my hair.
The days repeated.
I said a phrase and it was wind.
I lived and lived in nothing like silence.
I turned and turned.
Nothing was counting what the day was.
The house continued shrinking.
Inside my likewise shrinking mind I went to sleep.
Inside my sleep I walked the same way I had for hours waking.
I came upon a book.
I read the book and found it was the same book as this book now.
In every life.
The words fell through me like a word will.
I remembered nothing.
I was no older.
I was only alone still.
Inside the house in veils I hurtled forward in and on, trying to live on full with all absence; I could not hear any voice I understood, no matter how the edges of the space’s language called against my presence; the night went on and house went on around me as a house in the era of man; the days were old. Each life we’d lived was lived again inside me throbbing in all absence and would stay there like this now always.
I walked on in the color of the world, dragging back what I’d carried with there behind me humming till I’d dragged it so far through the world there was no world remaining to collapse in, or space to clean the image from my being, as in the wake the sand blew there lurked all these diamonds and hexagons of human crystal crushed in the color issued forth. Each color dragged on behind itself too every other color also dragging something there unseen, unlike what death was. Where I was alive now the light all turning pigged-out stroboscopic, to wake the rising melting flooding through the poreholes of our ex-begetters and relics, and therefore us as well — one long last note colored in the smell of walking and this mash of giddy marrow becoming mashed again around my tonsils and longest teeth. It made me hiss from holes I’d never known I had and soon would not again no matter what kind of perfect words were fished out from my ability to recall them beyond any light as all our essence.
I could hear several hundred hands surrounding in each instant and more so then with every knowing. Sand rolled limbs around my face’s blank — sand in no color I’d imagined, like the veils of smoke I slowly remembered from before, from worlds of tape not like this present moment, but no less false. The sand was inside me. The smoke was inside us mirrored. The air thugged thick, ticking no dream’s remainder away. There was nothing burning down. No matter where I went in any blackness I could not find the hallway to the integral rooms of what had felt like my own life in this world. The pillows of the darkness made each room each time I saw them seem to stretch more and more toward forever. Each time I thought or said a word aloud or tried to inhale, the caving in me emerged more. It was grinding in me. It was always.
I crawled along the floor, whatever a floor was. Inside the rising volume of my mind I slapped on hands and knees among the slick of surfaces between the earth and every body the air had made to keep us framed in; the sand beneath it swishing, as if being sucked into a hole, as if underneath the floor the only thing keeping the rest of the world from sucking in around me and you and everybody with it into some screaming hole focused from all the endless in what had been. My clothes seemed searing, knitting tighter, like every surface of my home, which in its latest alterations had become so close against me there was nearly nowhere left to move. I felt the walls where everything was not, no matter what I wanted. It was easier then to move without thinking where to go, though still the choking and croaking of my body, the unbelievable breadth of everything else. The shapeless sound coming from my mouth was feeding right back up into my nostrils, feeding my face full, covering over every memory again with the new deformation of what hours did, overwriting every idea of itself, every inch of anyone but me in me.
In me, then, the house could grow no smaller. I found it fit exactly with my mind. I’d become surrounded wholly by the same shade, the color of no color, all directions.
The color opened.
It was an eye.
Any eye.
The white of the light of the eye inside it was brighter than the house had ever been, wider than sky was, than my memory. Even thin as the film over the eye’s white seemed to be from far away, it held more edges than I could count; it held a past that hadn’t happened yet; it had always been in the house before there was a house; it gave the room around me its dimension; it had appeared in every age; it had observed every action; the eye of anything but now, of anyone but no one.
Against the color of the eye I could not see the walls or what beside them; I could not remember how I’d made way here through any other sort of being, outside the way I’d always come before to every present instant always again; though on the air there was the itch of something older bloating; colors like ions; sound like glass filling the air. There was no reason this hour should have been any different than all the other years of any life, and yet here the eye was, all surrounding.
Up close the eye no longer seemed to have a shape; it held together like a corpse, organs made of letters made of blank space of dots and lines feeding a warping shape like ours, which the longer I looked into blurred inside the light unto a gray mass like a wall. I stared into the eye and felt it humming without language; all words now no longer language. I closed my own eyes and saw the wall there too and looked again, a mirror image in my body made of bodies; then I was there inside the eye’s own head; I was seeing at the wall inside me as if everything I wasn’t was at the far side of the wall inside the light again made clear.
There was no shift; I found inside my seeing how I could scroll along the light’s face with the motion of my hand; the eye inside me held there against itself slithering downward to reveal itself again inside the extant eye made hidden on space forced in the space as in the oceans of our blood consumed, evaporated, nowhere; the light of all our faces.
I let the light come on in ruptured flues; it swam sick past my face like meat to meat, light pouring through where words were not, straining in the light to scan the flattened fiber of the vein of mottled language engorged and disappearing. Time passed and passed and nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; I could no longer remember how I was different than anything else, how anything else could not become me; the space around us held on, our blubber wooing like an ocean in a shell; my body not my body sticking at the frame of the page of the light folding our absent organism to its skin in rising heat and burning not of fire but of where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded both at once, under equal age and iteration, all ongoing, and the syntax burst between; each thought risen as a prison in our teeth and lungs and slapped ass screeching; eyes spinning locked in all our lids; speech mixing itself against itself to change itself and call itself the word inside the word against the word while outside itself the sand went on regardless, and each word as it came through us fell back out the other side, clung at old holes in landscapes, hopes unwinding.
I could no longer not quite think, or remember; the shapes of what was once clawed where my sound had never made a sound; feeding faster full of past thoughts, where every word a thought was made of wore a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so nothing; there in the light the bread of time; the speech of all speech whaling in us where far along the shafts of script in my own self I reached a drop, something sticking in the wash of blood between living and not living, looking there into the white along the current seeing faster until the sound inside the eye were these words, the run of light forming this sentence becoming typed across the screen of the eye of all our eyes no longer seeing, appearing newly every moment like something carried in my skin, each inch another name for silence.