He took the fingers of his right hand, and pulled on each one by one, until they came to form 5 straight, parallel lines. Then he massaged his palm as if to examine the birth lines ran across them, how their brownness was so incongruous with the whiteness of the rest of his palm, how that whiteness was so incongruous with the brownness of his skin, and mashed with his thumb the fleshy mass until he could feel nothing more within it. It burned from numbness. And then, rapidly, as if all sense of feeling had so far escaped him to be otherworldly and celestial, a radiant hot mass some light-years away that flickered as the after-glow of a thought he could not rekindle in his memory, rotating slowly in place, spinning violently on its axis, aggregating with cosmic gunk, his palm lurched violently upon his keyboard, and drunkenly flailed against each tinted black polygon, with each pang splashing up what seeped from the leaden, sunken clump of hearth that kindled soggy timbers, which was wrenched from his side while he cried at night. It was the spore sustaining his creative vision. And from the moment his right index finger hit H, he infused into it the life from the pang of the smash of the gavel against the board that hovered over his head while he slept, the one that sounded like his mother, father, and the night before, and found the first stanza, the one that said “you can not forget; you will drown here.” He wouldn’t drown, yet, although he was submerged; he had written the first paragraph.

Crawling through the cracks in his windows, scaling down the brick walls, meeting the soil, skirting over the blades of grass, over the aphids and dew drops, bent in a meniscus, unknowingly falling, the pitters of his typing swelled with the waves of the wind and the breasts of its curvature, kicking up the remnant dirt from the cleat of a rowdy boy, diving into the dent of a heel’s press against the ground, his thoughts—distracted by the birds, the cacophonies of laughter pouring in through his window, his hopes that delicately cracked under the weight of his past mistakes—could no longer be heard over his grief’s asymmetric rhythm. He stopped typing.

It was late now. The aphids cried as they plummeted, the dew drops fell, the blades of grass curved into their own hips to accommodate gravity’s weight, flexing to the pace of his fatigue’s tug. The cold air bit at the Plexiglas window. And all of sound—the vibrating hum of the fluorescent bulbs above him—all of light—the last droplets of starlight that could break their way in through the blinds in front of him—and all the mood—the glistening aura radiating from the moon’s half-cast reflection he could only sense in his periphery (his silence)—began to fade under his eyelids; the day had fainted. He paused; he shook himself. He caved (he spoke), and crawled underneath his blanket.