We suspected we might not be capable of being where we were in space and time without requiring something more. The few moments this was not true fled with the acknowledgment of their existence, usually when staring at the ocean, mouths agape at the majesty of the natural world, how it could dwarf us until none of this mattered, until all faces and desires were the same. But their sameness would fold back on itself in renewed discontent. We started to think of other people when you were around. This caught up to us, disturbed us. We were scared we did not know what this meant for us, if we were trying to displace some happiness with some unquenchable desire. Or if we were meant to be somewhere else. Or if we were realizing we were meant to be here and that we were fighting this realization by conjuring up unresolved pasts to reenact in this new coupled dark, when we were beginning not to be able to remember other people in the midst of the way you were eclipsing them. We will try to remember what it was like to be with them, sense memory features fading into photographs, those nervous tics and the timbre of a voice while falling asleep — these will wane and be lost in new features against our own new cells of skin. We shed those features, but our brains will fight against the nature of forgetting, conjuring up memory at inopportune times to remind us that we do not remember in the same way, not anymore. We will realize finally, and repeatedly, what we will not return to, no longer able to imagine who we once were. This, we will think to ourselves when we have enough distance to call it that, is progress. And now we begin, already, too soon, to imagine the day when this fresh you is a fading memory, another growing distance, eclipsed by another moon after this one (this glowing and inexplicable thing), when this has morphed, malignant, into its own parody. We hear this is what happens. People sink into one another until we cannot imagine what it would take to escape their gravity. And yet. We have seen once or twice, through a misplaced word, how easy it would be to let something spark off and quickly cool, not war or fireworks, just a few more days of silence. We have seen how tenuously the ground is balanced on the edge of the sea, how the Department of the Interior can try to hold it back with reinforcements against its fate, its suicidal desire to rejoin what will destroy it, picking up debris and us with it to spill into its own chilly womb. We have seen how tenuously the earth clings to its orbit, what scraps of planet keep other scraps of planet from floating off into the sky. We have seen what conversations we are not having, the ones that keep this thing teetering instead of falling into the sea that sucks the ground from beneath our feet. We have heard these conversations already, the ones about past and future, stories with pronouns omitted, futures with faces left off, gray manuscripts best left unilluminated. These are the unsewn edges, frayed and waiting for us to tug at their strings, to unravel it all. When we have these conversations, when they sneak up on us in the worst possible moments to deconstruct whatever bliss we have temporarily uncovered, dismantling the assumptions we fought so hard not to make in the first place, we will finally begin to see where something new that we could never have imagined being like that something old may be the same thing after all, that all of it is just a matter of what we say, how we choose to replay these same scenarios in the next version of the loop. Let's have these conversations now, forget that they can demolish our little buildings with strategically triggered explosives — better to destroy something merely on the verge of existence, better to know if, in the fire, we will melt or harden. We wonder if we are just trying to prove that everything breaks, that everything was already broken in us, flawed, unmendable. We wonder if it is only because we are trying to prove that everything breaks that we make this broken statement true, manifesting our own entropic vision, our own breakdown and the crumbling around us. We are not to be mended. This cannot be amended. The versions of this in which everything works out seem too impossible and empty, with their talk of being too full and beautiful. We are slowly beginning to uncover secret places where possibility is possible, where the earth confirms its promises to us and lets us stand our ground. We are having more nights like this, the nights begin to bleed into days we stay awake through the entirety of the sky's dark rotations, awake and tingling in a place where conversations feel more Real than real. We have rejected the notion of Real or Authentic (there's that word again), but we have yet to find other words that better describe the difference between these nights and the once and usual world we previously inhabited and will probably, soon, inhabit again. We hear this is what happens. We hear the earth will soon sink back into the sea. We visit wild places and marvel at how the world could crumble beneath our feet, how it is already crumbling. These wild crumbling places remind us that our homes are crumbling as well, that we are perched on impossible land — the cliffside highway is no different from the fault line landfill we have put cities upon — we are just clinging, to each other, building clinging to building, nails digging in and seams popping from the strain of a question, how to stay on top of our tiny islands. We are mesh upon the surface of nothing, holding back the continent from the sea.
