the hollᴏwness

So the main question is, What is 'you'? Or if it helps, what is 'me', here? Or if I'm on a printed page, with other characters (real or fictional (I resist the whim to use inverted commas on those two values)) and I coinhabit the space, the same plane, the same matter, ink, how far are the distinctions of black dye or pixels circumscribed? What if I am being read? If I blaze out and scatter and resonate and vanish in a cloud of what always has and always will come before me, and after me?

Jack

So this place where 'you' ends, or begins - there's really no distinction in this case, the unity of opposites and all such ambivalence. Your fingernails might be a clue - protruding from your hands, connected? embedded? affixed or inhabiting? Part of you like a tooth, though less permanent (more whims resisted). And when you cut your nail, or gnaw it off, what then? Is it still you, severed? Or is it, bereft, an Other? Not even bereft but isolated now and always. And are you less of you without it?

But I cannot have been the first to ask any of this empty questioning, all in all which winds back to the necessity of accepting the dissolution of the self- no, not that but the abstraction of the "you". I'm getting lost. Or not lost either, but too grounded. These words wither as I speak them.

There is no you here. Nor an I. Maybe not even a him. Or her.

What about a lock of hair?

Once, I saw Emily and Anne Brontë's hair entwined within a locket, an embrace meant to destroy borders, physical, emotional, temporal, personal. An embrace to forgo the caprice of things. It was in their old , empty now, save for how full it is of memory and thought. They turned it into a museum. I visited it myself. Took a coach from Manchester to a valley-slouched town over a hill from their own residence. I walked up to their home, stopping once, to drink some lemonade in a pub. I remember it now, full of bloated bubbles. It was the artificial, stale tasting kind. But I was thirsty, and I drank all of it, and I carried on.

Afterwards, I turned off and headed upwards, and eventually found my way to the graveyard near that place. It took a while of pacing up and down the yards, line by line of tombs. But I found it. Or her?

"ɪɴ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ

sʏʟᴠɪᴀ ᴘʟᴀᴛʜ ʜᴜɢʜᴇs

1932 - 1963

 ᴇᴠᴇɴ ᴀᴍɪᴅsᴛ ғɪᴇʀᴄᴇ ғʟᴀᴍᴇs

ᴛʜᴇ ɢᴏʟᴅᴇɴ ʟᴏᴛᴜs ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ,"

And flowers marked it, but they were weeks old, or longer. Almost gone. She was almost gone too, even there. But only almost. The rock was cold and rough to the touch, like the skull of a sheep I found in a field. Out there, just before. In the moores.

There was dirt on the grave, and with a tissue I wiped at it. Some came off. The stone was no less grey. The flowers were still brown and brittle.

How much of fire blazes within us?