All My Goodness to Show
Skyler Stirling
cord stretching back forever into forever snap, just slightly, because it let you see what it was trying to be. That tiny nagging intuition that this had all happened before became animate and displayed before you - what else is someone supposed to do when presented with a reminder that the audience for this little gem bubble of emergent complexity is still watching? Would you forget this in your supposed DMT death dream, when you watch the moon give birth to life once more by body-guarding the earth against the angry brother sun and you watch the universe gain a mystery outside the frame of language for a sea of children by the observatory, and riding in someone’s SUV down a slow residential road you see the cops look up and the symbols adorning the window controls and air conditioning switches stretch back to the first alphabet? If you were to line up every number from one to infinity, and then draw lines linking the primes together in little arcs they would ripple out progressively more and more until they met in a series of nested little fractal waves glowing red against the void of the numbers that don’t exist. If you were to trace the outlines of where these waves meet you would see very clearly the preciousness of each moment we share, how brightly these intersecting points shine like gems fashioned from the lives of the simple and humane things we want to be. You would see that the whole of this fragile little lattice is glinting against the shifting slow geometry of the dark below us, and that James Baldwin was right beyond right when he said that the second we break faith with each other we drown. Each of our cities is a nest for the things we say and have said to each other, and the stories that echo around in quiet metro 56
