3. It doesn’t look like meaning - it looks like the absence of it. It doesn’t look like shimmering, vivid colour - it looks like a black hole sucking everything around it into a dense singularity. It doesn’t look like the glistening cross-section of an orange sliced perfectly in two - it looks like two halves that cannot be divided, and the mess that spills out when you try. GO CAREFULLY. IF YOU LOOK TOO LONG, YOU WILL BECOME A PART OF IT. It doesn’t look like the slow curl of a suppressed smile - it looks like a pile of teeth. It doesn’t look like the wobbling white-hot centre of the sun - it looks like the fractal gaps between the unfurling arms of a snowflake It doesn’t look like the impressions of seams on skin at the end of the day - it looks like hard granite carved into a grim pastiche on a pedestal. It doesn’t look like a sea of faces, the rippling applause, or the standing ovation - it looks like dusty red threadbare curtains, frayed and faded. It doesn’t look like glass, amorphous and trembling in the presence of sound - it looks like the static silence at the end of the universe.

1. Around me there are fragments, and fragments of fragments - and within those are the glowing filaments that curl around each moment that crystallises and rings out like clear, crushed supersymmetry. On the wall of the filament hangs an image that shimmers and melts into the carpet. In the carpet are the beetles who drink the meltwater - they told you when to turn up but you didn’t believe them, and somehow it doesn’t seem relevant now, with these fragments of fragments of filaments from crystallised moments embedded so deep in the soles of your feet. Autonomy comes at a price - you remember where you first heard that? Neither do I. But it’s always been there in the back of your head, niggling away at synapses, making those electrons bumping around your brain infinitesimally less nimble.