The aliens arrived and they read our DNA just like a book. They had no interest in our words. They sampled the oceans and its diseases, a pathology specimen from the self-destructive damsel of this solar system, an off-smelling primordial soup that has sat on the counter for too long, infested with small creatures who consume too much for their size. And just like that, they disappeared as if they were never here.

What a strange insult it was. It felt so deeply personal.

As creatures on this Earth, we spend our lives in self-awareness, in continuous nit-picking, in little wars of carefully controlled destruction against the “other” who can damage us. Grooming has worked to keep us free of pests and to prevent illness. We do it in order to make us look invisible to predators and to protect those in close quarters of us. We need it to not become like that man, who everybody knows at least one of, at the corner of a generic city street. That man usually has a beard as long as hair can grow and clothes so thoroughly soaked in old sweat and urine stains that the salts are oppressively crystallizing him into a statue the longer he stays still. Nobody knew how he became this way.

I used to be creative. I used to make music, construct images, to write, to draw. I used to have a thirst to learn. Now I am petty and self absorbed, I have turned out just like my father.

I am a one dimensional character paralyzed by self awareness, full of self loathing. But I am the next model up. A fork in the map, that ends at its own node. I was not built for replication, so why am I assigned a female name? When I was in my first year, he tied a ribbon on my hair. When I was sent to school, they told me to wear a dress. They gave me a doll too – she was just like me, but mute.

I am tied to an external lifeline of energy sources, for which I must work. He told me that is how he has lost his own creative life, after my production. He said men operate the world using numbers guarded by their family branches, made vulnerable by physical emotions in their meat brains. Women help them make more men.

I dashed quickly out of her greasy hands, past the bodyguard onto the street, zipping my jeans back up under the floodlamp behind my head, unsatisfied. The rain, backlit begun vacuuming back its own tears in reverse as underneath my feet, the water was gluttonously purged out by the storm drain.

Innocence was gained. Time ran faster backwards – as I scrammed like an insect trying to save myself, I was rapidly forgetting who that was. Declining memory, gaining identity, chasing after a homeless man on the platform as he stared at me and laughed, smirking and then left.

The train timetable went blank as the sole purpose to my existence became protectionist survival, the pull of the desire to go back home, its purpose more and more paradoxical by the second. My answers turned into questions, but were followed by defragmentation and resolution. The horizon fell into a murky puddle, but eventually my eyes became simple enough to see everything in the universe: it was binary light and shadow.

I was Ganymede of Galileo, not of Zeus, protected by a battered skin in pits from disease of the body and glacier scars dragging across the skin from disease of the mind.

Scratch the insect bite until you break skin; the itch has now gone. The insect has not. You will wake up again, unremarkable memories from the previous day purged and censored, senses recalibrated to do it all again.

The insect has bitten me once more during the night and I have scratched in my sleep.

Sleeping like a nomad at night in the international space station, they said you hit the ground headfirst if you don’t start by aiming at the low hanging fruit before flying out to Mars.

With memories fragmented across the universe, past times are still well versed in all our worlds, alas the singularity may only exist once every puzzle piece has truly fit into the bigger picture and we have sealed the gap of interpreting depictions, for they are fractures, unintended designated points of failure.

Babel was never there and our tongue prints are as disconnected from our dialects as our finger prints never match our handwritten signatures, faces not analogous to our pictures, generic descriptors that can be changed through casual wear, a different look, but harbouring the same outlook and chemical insides, insidiously changing in short lived timeframes in marble microworlds on the guts of the macro-turf we think we stand in. Newspapers don’t keep you warm inside.

Her eyes glimmered like green marbles rolling across a classroom floor.

It was a memory that left me bruised – like the knees under her socks, which were covered in scrapes from blissfully playful and carefree ignorance; those first few strikes of exposure to the outside world. Her cracked lips smiled at me awkwardly from a distance across the fence, pushing her cheeks into dimples with sleep still in her eyes mid-afternoon. She pulled her socks over her knees and ran away.

One must have no regret for inaction. Alas, good things do not come to those who wait, as what we wait for, often only exists as a glimmer of light in the past. A passing moment, illusion of a ghost in shadow which disappears with the flicker in a matchstick. A memory of a past, which once materialized expires – the sweetness, which once described on paper, rolls to the back of the tongue that can only taste bitter, where it is no longer recognized, but undesirably makes us grow fat; a materialization of our guilt which piles on for everybody to see. The baggage under our eyelids and behind our backs, the baggage we only see once we must move on.

If our minds are comfortable and uninspired we will remain unevolved, like Southern marsupials, free of competition, inside a vacuum, too stagnant and stale to encourage change. For change is a forceful, effort-requiring utilitarian behaviour. For change is the reaction to discomfort. Few have enough intellectual discomfort to experience willpower.

We will continue to look up to the Logos – but oh! Of Mithras we have not heard in the past 2 centuries gone! He too was dishonest if he was true and amongst us. But perhaps Zoroaster was himself not even there to lend an ear to listen.

Worshippers of the sun, you too will see the dark screen of polarisation. You will create an opinion, you will take a side and you will become blind. Your sun too will one day die, long after your eyes have disintegrated into the dust.

An irrational, unbearable fascination. The compulsion to look into somebody’s eyes, the screen through which our perception of somebody is distorted whilst we experience the paradoxically intense desire to know them, to analyse the structure of their persona, every grain composing their skin, slopes at the peak of an ear, every web of their iris whilst we are blinded by oxytocin and overwhelmed by our own sensations, unable to look through the souvenir memories our senses have picked. The haze is textured like the skin of another on the other side of a window in the early morning sun. A paradox of being within proximity, yet not being aware of things underneath our very nose.

Why is it that we so fascinated by these distortions? How do we wish to see that which is obscured by our own very desire to see it? For we know…why. I do not wish to state the obvious. Albeit film fades at the rate of sentimentality. Sentimentality’s life supply fades at the rate of mystery’s half-life in a memory. There is no elegance, for thought and feeling are not in a symbiotic union. The haze is beautiful, for it creates a joyous simplicity. And it is all irrelevant once we realise we cue for a ride in the train of experience, of predictable reactivity. The sequel is only written after the jig is up.