From the In Between

Between worlds, Avia came. Somehow, she slipped in. I have been thinking of the place she inhabits for some time now. Months have passed me by. There is a city sketch, a complex weave, and she is one part of this. There are others somewhere in the cloth, but they have yet to show. I put my head down thinking of time and space and place and what it all could be, here, there; I was woken suddenly, later in the broken light. Avia whispered her name.

The morning before, it was someone else to have infiltrated that space: that breach between the comfortable density and the alertness of the possibility of being hunted. There, some man I didn’t know, someone who assumed a minor greatness of the written world, took a book of mine. With disregard for what that book had seen, for who had touched it, loved it, for the words of delicate love traced inside the cover, the man pushed flat the spine and etched his own inscription there. It woke me suddenly: I couldn’t recover the book as it was before him — untouched since love, tarnished now and forever on.

This gap, this in between, has long since been an attractor of the conscious realm. This is not without its irony: such conscious agitation of the mind about the space between worlds where conscious agitation cannot be. The more we think of it, perhaps, the farther we push it away. Yet, nevertheless, here I am in contemplation of the shape of the shapeless, the breadth and depth of the amorphous, the texture of the inside of something I cannot ever reach, here, now, as I can write or as I can think it.

There are gaps in between sleep states, within and in between woken meditations, in between our woken autotelic states. There are gaps within the automatic functions that we fall through. Within all these, we may find the slight embodiment of words or ideas we laboured through; the deeply buried reaction that we never knew to be there, to conspire to catch us off-guard; the sensation on the skin, half-remembered, half-conjured; the name of someone sought amongst a city, half-formed, half-lit.

I drive, I wash, I stand and watch the day. There is a soporific softness to the urgency of the road, the stacking restlessness of the diary, the gathering darknesses of othernesses that could be done; they’re all attended to by the robot core — ticking, processing, clanking quietly deep down beneath. I drive, I wash, I stand and watch the day. I fall between the cracks of worlds.

This, at least, is how this thinking, writing, conscious agitation of the mind presumes it. I can’t tell for sure because I’m not there, for sure, between the cracks, in the gaps, between worlds. I know I surface with words, though sometimes slight; with reactions I didn’t know were there; with sensations whose memories still play upon the skin; with the names and hints of those entrenched in some half-lit, half-formed city.

Avia stretches out her arms, as I think her now. She’s already receded far and deep down. The shadows of this some place I have been thinking of swallow her, for now. She’s fey on the temple, on the pillow, perhaps. One man broke a book: he defiled the tracings of words and love there. He is the blemish of some underworld of this some other world. Both are in between, somewhere I can’t see for sure here: so I think.