Sunday, 1 July 2012

Zero


Lying flat out on my cool white bed, sunken to the bottom of my aquarium attic room, and the light through the wooden shutters ripples on my eyelids. My head is doing some sort of dream-maths, and coming up with the same answer over and over. Zero, zero, zero. No. No. No. Whichever way I pose the question. Whichever way I add up my integers. The numbers can be anything, they can be everything, they can be infinite. But it's always zero that I come back to. That nothing. That absence. That no. No, Nothing, Gone, Alone; all the words you can make with zeroes in them.

I turned my back and now I have nothing. Someone must have multiplied everything by zero when I wasn't looking.

And it's always the zero that screams out the loudest, that you notice the most. Not a sore thumb, but a missing one. Our eyes are drawn to what's missing, above what's there. Negative space is all-important. It's the missing tooth you can't stop tonguing. The last step that isn't there. Your foot falls away into nothing and it's nothing that you're missing. Why do you have to be so nothing, why do you have to be the zero that I can't ignore?

My maths dreams reflect and fold in on themselves in confused geometry as I fall into sleep. Above my roof red kites screech and slice circles into the sky like pairs of compasses.

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is a human being with two x chromosomes during whose life the earth has circumnavigated the sun 20 times.