What the New Caledonian Said, by Charles Freeland

And maybe you are surprised by the enormity of your emotions. By your tendency to grasp at un-tuned harps. As if they were made out of some rare compound. Some exotic metal so valuable it causes an upsurge in suicide just as soon as it hits the market. Does this mean you will no longer recognize yourself in the pages of the encyclopedia? In the water color portraits painted by the woman who sits in the window? Who looks out at the street below as though at some preternatural ice age? Or is it all made so utterly simple in the end, we pass over it with barely a nod? With barely a cyst under the skin to remind us of what we have been doing so long without. I am of the mind that the regicides and alimony bring us back to the restive condition. That place where we are so completely surrounded by our element, we start to consider it alien simply because we no longer recognize it. Because the nerve fibers are made bare through a process of twisting. Of asking the wrong questions. And then sticking around for the veal. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, the days liquefy. The image of the beloved’s body, frail as a vase, and yet somehow daunting, magnificent, fails to stick around. It too becomes a shadow of itself. And then something almost impossible to describe. Just as though it never really existed in the first place. And if you are to retain it in even this most rudimentary form, you will have to accept it is at least seventy-five percent your invention. But what does this mean for the mind that invented it? Why should it be aggrieved? And where is the utility in grief, that thing that makes it stick around despite its drawbacks, like weeds? Like the vestigial digits in the wings of a bat?