i. Numbers & Letters

There is no way to capture a thought with all its intricacies, pushed to the sides by surrounding stimuli. This is why when they kiss, they only do so at intersections, traffic — a burgeoning monster with its gaping maw and gasoline breath. The light is seconds away from reflecting red, from shouting: Warning you might be killed, you might spill your guts all over the pavement, the last thing you ate falling out of that cavity. See also: the girl beneath the 1 train at Canal Street, do you understand?

ii. Shapes

Everything is about the negative space formed when you open your mouth; together they fit their empty parts, intersecting at the seams, sewn together by a clumsy seamstress. Without the shape of nothing this could not be, without the triangle of transparency formed by her hand on her hip — a distress signal, a call for companionship — he would have no space to slip his arm through hers, following the bloodstream to her heart. Clever negatives make things positive!

iii.Consciousness

I always forget the rest of my sentences. See also: “You guys look so sweet …” It’s those damn black holes that swallow the words before they can escape, fringing the circumference of those hungry beasts, swallowing energy and photons. Don’t worry about this consciousness, it’s still thinking about “together.”

iv. Neighborhoods

When you put two consciousnesses together, you form a consci — a connected couple with four legs and four hands, an octopus that’s entangled inside itself. With three, it’s a crowded bed, a jealous friend, a single mother with a child looking to meet her first husband. More than four consciousnesses, and you get neighborhoods where formalities are passed around like cake at a party, and no one tells the other about the arsenic coating almonds.

v.’The’

I suppose ‘the’ is the whole meaning. We use it to point out certain things: the almonds, the girl with her lost conscience, the emptiness that was supposed to connect her heart and her brain, the number of times she swallowed apple seeds and wished for new growth, but they died in her lungs, too comforted by the moist air to sprout in the darkness.

This is the theory of letting go, and the meaning, when erased, is nothing.