When the Earth Pushed Back

Parataxis: let us start with how we mythologize ourselves.

I stood on the ground, yet as of this moment, I am still standing. The ground has never stayed the same after the passing of seconds, minutes, hours—and after a while, I am not standing anymore. I am unmoving and getting tired. I shift my weight to one foot and back to the other after a minute or so. I keep doing this while waiting, feeling the weight of the passing time with my two feet. Tomorrow is another today and yesterday was another here. The soil slowly unmoors itself from me like a promise on the verge of being broken.

From the exosphere, the earth is an emotion that goes by the name of “gentle tremors.”

My soul is eroding from my skin and my skin becomes an island made out of foreign languages. What is it about simple words about emotions like anger, fear, and hate that makes them insufficient in retrospect? When I look back, I always find myself at a distance from the past and/or the future. Tenses confuse me. I look down at my feet and the earth is becoming a gibberish of phonemes, symbols, and irrational geometries.

Is it language that changes me or the world that shows itself in language? Or is it language that shows itself through the world? If the world only speaks in tongues, I can only understand it through silence. I become a rest, a breath, a caesura, a punctuation in speech.

What separates me from the earth and what binds me to it is a single lie about the universe. I am always already a timeless fiction happening in a world made by an ocean of foreign consciousness.