All the shapes we made were rectangular and then we lived in them. I had no baby, this was tolerated. Pebbles came to me in my sleep and when I woke up, I would write them down. I was told that everywhere around me was the slow collision of billions of years.

 

In the mornings, just as the world birthed its own sense of color, I would walk around the rectangles. I did this on a long rectangle. Edges helped us come into clearer focus. At the edge of everything was a big mirror, a big swelling crashing mirror. Sometimes we would jump into it, ride its waves, try to keep our eyes open to its stinging salts. There were other creatures that lived in this mirror, and they were beautiful. I could never breathe like them, and so I mostly stayed at a distance. Enjoying the sound of the mirror but not what it brought me. I did not like to use my eyes for anything.

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If I were to lie on the ground, I could hear the sounds of people rumbling on their way from here to there. We had these great big rectangles that could move quickly because of all the energy stored inside of the great big earth. They burped with such force that when I lay on the ground I could feel their vibrations inside all of the pieces of my skin. I was told that inside of me there were hard white things, redness, energy, and a kind of oozing yellow slime. I never saw any of these things. If I were to believe everything that I was told, then how would I understand the world at all?

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I am speaking in the past tense because that’s how I’ve been told to tell a story. I was told that wisdom comes through experience, and if you speak to a crowd, you must convince them of your wisdom. I am very experienced, I have done all of these things that I tell you about. They already happened to me, even as they are happening right now. For example, I am on a walk.
 

The cactuses on my walk are wide and pronounced. They like to assert their connection to divinity by staying as upright as possible. They are not unfriendly, but they do not like to be cuddled. When I was younger, I would embrace the pricklings into the surface of my skin so that I could be close to them. But now it is too itchy, and so I continue walking without any handshakes, simply a small salute with the tip of my fingers warbling like the bouncing dots of an energy field—the typical good morning. I can feel the hunger in the base of my stomach like a rubbery insistence. I hate to eat. There is nothing to me as pointless as nourishment. It dawns on me again, the thought of opening my mouth and biting into the cactus. Feeling the pins in my mouth, down my throat, and dying from it. But I keep walking.

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The hunger is like a leash around my abdomen, pulling me back. But I must finish my morning circuit, a big rectangle tracing around the other rectangles. Soon I will turn at an edge and walk straight until the next turn. I find that if I don’t follow these edges with the utmost attention, then I diminish in size. It’s a subtle diminishment, barely anyone can tell. Even I can’t tell at first. But every day, slowly, I get smaller and smaller; slow, lethargic. I lie horizontally across surfaces and forget how to use my legs. My desire for death increases, everything loses color. The mornings blur into the night. I can’t keep anything straight. People come and put their hands on me and I’m too dissolved to tell them to keep to themselves. There is something so dearly erotic about these episodes that I’m constantly fighting to keep myself from having them. It is a daily battle inside of me, whether or not to be a rectangle. But today I keep walking, because I’ve started talking to someone who is trying to convince me that I am happier this way. And it is true, when I can connect to the simplicity of existence, I am happier. I go on walks and feel delighted by the touch of the air. By simply having skin with which to feel. I do not like becoming the sheets of the bed, I do not like my head feeling so heavy.
 

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This person I talk to, she is very nice. It is she who told me to start talking like this. To tell my story. It’s taken me a long time to find a story to tell. So now I will tell you one. Once there were two birds living on the wires of an electricity pole. They were good friends. They didn’t remember when they met or how long they’d known each other, they just knew that it felt good to be together. They could fly anywhere they wanted. It was warm enough that they never had to migrate or find a new home. There were other birds around, but they mostly stuck to themselves. When they wanted to feel a little loopy, they would clamp their claws down on the black wires and feel small vibrations running through their entire bodies. It made them feel uninhabited and insane. They would flop and squawk and dive and be incredibly merry. One time, they saw a little nest of baby mice, and without even talking about it, they dove down and ate every single one of them. Every time they’d get loopy from the electricity wire, they would laugh about it. One day, one of the two birds seemed unusually distracted.  Let’s say her name is Dasha.

 

“Dasha, is everything okay?”

 

Dasha looked both grumpy and elated. 

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“I’m not so sure. I feel funny.”

 

“I can tell,” said Rooney, the other bird. “What do you think is going on?”

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“Well, it started yesterday. When I was making my evening loop around the park, I saw a bird I haven’t seen before. Only from the side, but he was so striking. It made my stomach flip and I threw up my lunch.”

 

This made Rooney laugh, but when she batted Dasha with her wing, there was more force behind it than she’d intended. She told Dasha that he probably just reminded her of her dad or something. Rooney had never met Dasha’s dad, but she had heard all about him.

 

Then Rooney invited Dasha to take a wind current to the beach with her so they could scavenge for some French bread. Dasha smiled at this, and the two of them flew away together.
 

They found an entire baguette and more than one slice of cheese, but even this only made it stranger that Dasha seemed somehow far away. They flew home. Dasha seemed to keep her eyes peeled the whole way, as though she was looking for someone.

​

A week later, Dasha had a confession to make: she was in love.

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Rooney looked at her blankly. Her entire heart had fallen out of her butt, which was a feeling she’d never had before, so she was unsure what it was or how to describe it other than to literally say that her heart had fallen out of her butt.

 

“Remember that bird I had told you about, the one from the park?” 

 

“No.” 

 

Rooney had conveniently forgotten all about this bird.

 

“Last week, I saw this bird. I told you about him. And then I saw him again.

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And then again. Yesterday I was in the park terrorizing one of the squirrels and he started talking to me, he’s very sweet. Handsome and not too cocky, like all the other dumb birds. We ended up taking a little ride together and we even found some crumbs on this stairwell that were delicious, we ate them together, and I think we were, flirting? He kept throwing little crumbs at me with his beak, and it kept making me laugh.”

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“Yeah, we do that all the time?” Rooney racked her brain to remember the last time that she had thrown crumbs at Dasha.

​

“I know, but this was different. I sort of, like him? It’s only been a week, but he feels different from those other stupid birds we avoid. I want you to meet him, I think you’ll like him too.”

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“I’m sure I will, if you like him so much. I’m sure I’ll really like him a lot.”

 

“This won’t change anything between us,” Dasha said, as she pecked at Rooney’s beak with her own.
 

Dasha arranged for the three of them to eat persimmons from the very old tree the next afternoon, and Rooney did not like him. He was dumb-looking and he laughed too loudly. He made Dasha bat her eyelashes and look down as though shy. Rooney realized that the only thing she could do to salvage this was to make him her boyfriend. This way, he could still hang out with them without taking all of Dasha’s attention. But no matter how much she flirted with him, he still seemed to prefer Dasha.

​

That night, as Rooney and Dasha tucked into their pole together, Rooney decided this would be okay. It was a fling, a flirtation, there was space for this dumb boy to hang out with them. Nothing would really change.

 

Everything changed. Suddenly, Dasha was flying and hunting and pecking three or four days a week with Todd. She would come home talking about Todd, her cheeks red and her eyes batty. It wasn’t long before Dasha told Rooney that she was going to spend some nights on Todd’s branch two blocks away.

 

“I think I love him,” she said. “Isn’t this so exciting?”

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It wasn’t exciting. Rooney would sit on her pole and stare at Dasha’s claws curling around the wire and wonder why she was so miserable all of a sudden. Why did it feel so awful to be sharing Dasha? Why did it matter if two more birds paired off like this? What Rooney couldn’t let herself know was that she already knew why. Rooney wanted to be the bird that made Dasha’s whole body feel like it was being poked with a thousand hot pins. Rooney wanted to be the bird that Dasha couldn’t wait to see, that Dasha spent every night curling up next to, that Dasha felt breathless and bound to. And hadn’t all of this been exactly what they had already been doing together, up until this point, up until Todd had come around? 

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“His laugh is forced, don’t you think so Dasha? And the way he combs his hair. Like, what does he think he is, a human?”

 

This made it harder and harder for Dasha. Rooney knew this, but she couldn't help it. She needed to feel chosen by Dasha—she needed to feel like it wasn’t easy to see her, so that every time Dasha saw her, it was a choice Dasha was making because she loved her.

 

As you can probably tell, soon Rooney was alone on her telephone pole. Dasha joined Todd on his tree branch for good. They still see each other at the park sometimes, but it’s awkward. They both pretend like they’re happy for the bump-in, but it’s mutually painful. The truth is that Dasha loves Rooney a lot and misses her terribly. On the surface, she’s not quite sure where Rooney went and why they weren’t able to seamlessly make room in their lives for Todd. She does know, of course, but it’s a knowing that makes her feel tingly and bad. And Todd makes her happy. It’s easy to be with Todd, all the other birds are delighted to see her with Todd in a way that they never were to see her with Rooney. And her parents are so proud of her, to find such a sweet and handsome bird to be paired up with. And they’re thinking of having children this Spring, and soon she’ll have all these things to do to raise her children that, really, she probably won’t have any time to be thinking about Rooney at all. But she does still think about Rooney. There’s a part of her heart that knows only Rooney’s name, that doubles in on itself every time she sees her at the park. Her slender beak, her gray wings. And so when they see each other at the park, they smile at each other with an assertive it’s been so long, how are you!, and then they turn away from each other and go about the duties of their day.

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This is where I will end the story, even though Dasha and Rooney’s lives continue on and more things happen to both of them. I’m nearly at the end of today’s walk. Just one more angle to make, and then I’ll be back to the rectangle that I know best. When I told this story to my lover she said, I didn’t listen to most of it. When I asked why, she said, I think because it makes me uncomfortable, these stories about friendship. I told her it was not about friendship, it was about love, but I could tell she had already stopped listening again. We were in a rectangle going very fast down another rectangle, and all the world was a blur of rain around us. I felt like a very important missile being shot horizontally into the mouth of god.

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This reminds me of another thing I would like to tell you: this thing we did with the walls. We would take our bodies and put them into angular poses, and then we would put those poses onto the walls of our rectangles. That way, when we walked around inside of what we had built, we could see the version of ourselves that we could love the most. We were told that it was how we could be friends with ourselves. There was also a small cuff that I wore on my wrist and it told me everything: how many times I had moved my legs in a forward direction, the shifting of my body’s energy currents, how many more calories I needed in order to not pass out before the sun had set. The information was pulsing everywhere and there was no better place to feel it than in the small crevice of my genitals. It was almost as if all of it—the rectangles, the beautiful girls, the numbers—were all built so that I could feel as erotic and turned on as possible throughout the day. There were shoulders and breasts everywhere, twinkling down at me from every platform. The device in my hand, in my ears, on my eyes, in the air while driving past, while walking past, while ambling past, in front of the film, behind the film, jingling through the airwaves, even in the newspaper.

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The woman I talk to tells me that I have to focus on myself, my own story, my own truth. But there really is nothing to say.  I wasn’t hit on the head and no one switched out the good milk for the rotten. I came here with the mission to be the slowest moving creature I could possibly be, and every day I suffer for it. I just walk these rectangles and kick the rocks looking for some kind of exit.