bones shifting like moving trees. lungs against bruised ribcages. like everything has been tangled in an anniversary of every thought you’ve ever had then fitted within the silent spaces; those gaps between words, the dark surrounding stars, whenever you pause to take a breath. hey i’m paper and smoke and shifting bones. i’m a mix of yesterday’s words with crowds of consonants in my knees, whispering stories down empty corridors. i am paper and smoke and shifting bones. i can feel the weight of the columns in my spine. i want to know what it would be like to wake up with the freedom of no memory of yourself, just the opening of eyes that were filled with years without realising what colour they were. memory is too subjective, it mixes like smoke in the cooling air. we used to sit in alcoves where the trees would tap against glass beside us as if they thought we couldn’t see them. your voice would slowly seem to echo the tapping of the stretching branches as you retold stories of everywhere we’d ever been. i would turn my hands like pages in front of you but there was nothing ever written there. your stories never reminded me of anything except for grand houses with fire flickering across bearskin rugs and these were things i’d never seen firsthand. i’ve heard stories of our entire collective histories being coded into the dna of cockroaches. a living breathing history surviving ice ages and nuclear blasts, the four notes of beethoven’s symphony no. 5 replicating in their cells. our stories were never part of any cells, they only divide continuously over different tongues, expression punctuating every line, until there’s nothing left.

also, i have a question. where do you get your ideas? are things you post bits of stories, or just random ideas that you write down?

my ideas come from thoughts that i think too much and need to make into something else less real. either that or they come from listening to a certain song, seeing a particular movie, conversations or interpreting other people’s thinking and then disguising it again. although i don’t usually get complete ideas with anything i write, just a sentence then everything else follows. and it’s all a combination of things that have actually happened and things i’ve made up. i think everything i’ve put here is a mix of both bits of stories and random ideas as in they are separate but part of the construction of one whole story. each character is a mix of everyone i’ve ever known and everyone i’ve pretended to know. and the ‘you’ can refer to a certain person in one sentence and a different person or set of people in the next. it’s like it’s my heavily disguised journal, it’s like tearing down walls and building them back up into metaphors.

thank you so much for what you wrote before this by the way! i swear it made me blush all the way down to my toes.

we gasp the air to feed our thoughts that are so disjointed. it’s like someone has collected every piece of scrap paper and told us ‘look here’s your story.’ but this doesn’t feel like much of a story, it feels like discoloured and abandoned lines. we crossed them years ago when we decided to laugh at everything that was tinged with grey. we forgot about a lot of things, we just hear far off vague rustles from lost nerve endings that are knotting like yarn. they lead to tall stories that are just asking to be torn down. all i can think of is packed lunches and then eyes that sing of distraction. a pat on your back, yes ok, good luck with exploring that infinite abyss.