I read words that resonate profoundly inside that part of my soul that's searching for answers. They tickle familiar sensations and calibrate the state of consciousness that's brought me here. They offer me gills to breathe underwater and navigate a bubble world that darkens the more you seek for truth. Water is not my element; it's always felt strange, alien, hostile and uninviting. It's supposed to be in my blood, but it's a resource I will never succeed in exploring, let alone enjoy. I am earth and fire, and wind only makes me stronger though I don't belong to it. The words. I give them back the gills and open my lungs. Then I inhale smoke, tar and dark tobacco. They have never once complained; maybe they're saving it for when I'm older, wiser and closer to death. How can twenty-six letters do all this damage? How can they amalgamate lust, anger and tenderness into a soul-made, metallic structure of pure longing? How can they penetrate every wall you've put up when their sound waves haven't even crossed your path? They twist and turn and infiltrate the stitches you've made to close the wounds that refuse to heal. I have an atom tattooed on my elbow. In Greek that word 'atom' also stands for person. 'Oh, I didn't realize that's what it was,' somebody told me recently. 'Why an atom?' he continued. I wasn't drunk enough to explain.
How can twenty-six letters bind two atoms together? Press them against each other, then disappear, and find them panting side by side minutes later? Breaths are then exhaled with no words inside them. By then they have become obsolete. When they reappear they are rudimentary. It is we who adorn them with definition and force. It is our carbon dioxide that embellishes them into alleged coherence. The oscillations of our tongue delineate our conduct and envisage the likelihood of a reiteration.