The test involved slides: a minute for each slide – to look and write down what was pictured. Name of work, artist, date. I am not good with tests or most games. Not just the ones one knows about. There are tests and games you only feel. They are given at any time. I refuse if I do know. And you can only avoid someone’s friends for so long. In fight or flight, I usually flee. How strange then, not to be scared.
This was not because I had someone watching out. I had my system, I had done the work. It’s hard to describe, being behind my own recognition. Cues inside associations…. songs, streets, colors or a rhyme. Expressions and sayings. Animal, vegetable, mineral …. that open query. The first thing coming to your mind. I put this together, it became my world: happless incongruity falling into place. Something not to talk about but know. Private meaning. A code. I was ready, my mind in place.
I imagined the allignment of a sun dial, beam of light onto metal. I looked up across the room at the tops of heads. Coming back from getting water, he looked up at me and smiled. This moved through my body, a pang. My freeing thrill. I continued my work, so brilliantly not quantitative. Long since sleeping having slept, I was going on the energy beyond being tired. I felt good. This happens even when the brain is on its own. After the test he had a break. We took our tea behind the building. I went home to bed, still in the test, still at school. And back behind the building with him, beneath a tree.
There is a way I was always with him, knowing his voice, a definite smell. But there is a way he was only in my mind. He took the place of all I longed for. I would catch myself catching my breath.
