Anonymous- "On Thinking Over Reasons to Live

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To have the pleasure of rearranging the future like a jigsaw puzzle, 

continually imagining 

things moving away from each other 

and closer together. So that 

when my mother says that 

Each day is a new day 

she isn’t entirely wrong. A day is a way 

to pass through a life unseen. 

When I talk about mathematics all that concerns me is 

talk about invisible limits, 

a runner cutting things in half and 

never reaching zero. Someone 

listening just beyond the door. A limit 

that you can’t see, but still 

exists. Like how a friend told me she 

knew she would never be a pro athlete

By the time she was twelve. Or 

how I knew I would only be capable of 

mercies only approaching kindness. 

To catalog something is to 

prepare yourself to live with it.

An unknown day with 

All its variables scattered and re-grouped 

until the hand spells out 

Infinity. I know of no infinity yet, but it is true 

that maybe i think of the

quantum mechanics of being anything 

A little too often. As if 

there’s a language to be found 

in the way things almost touch 

but don’t: you walking into an almost-room, 

it almost-raining, the feeling of 

almost-love. Our atoms will never know  

each other, but our children will. in the 

future i have no name for, i create a pocket  

for the impossible: meeting myself at the cinema, 

braiding the hair of the child I once was. There, 

we continually circle each other, 

paced into equilibrium. So now 

I describe you as a storm curling around 

the lip of a glass, the stain of 

a hurricane, an animal alive enough to say hello.

I leave the jigsaw pieces scattered on 

the floor for some unlucky 

passerby to find in un-linear time from  

this  point onwards, to 

make some mark you can’t 

shake out of your

monkey head. I want you 

to guess at my reasons, to make 

archaeology of why I did or 

almost didn’t. I am 

combing infinity’s hair, 

counting notes and time 

in a neighborhood of the meantime. 

Everything lives in-between. 

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