Reorganizable Chemical Elements

*squint*

World out of focus. Bitter taste. Back aches. Loud, mashed sounds. Milky light.

You spend minutes looking at hands. Slowly, your mind transitions and clears. You keep staring at your fingers. They look like those pretty things that grow when art polinizes tech schools.

Slowly, your eyes adapt to this atmosphere that feels opaque as air – or opaque as water.

All depends on which half of the horizon you come from, anyway.

Ever so slowly, feelings become words in your mind. Nouns and verbs, then adjectives and adverbs. All the grammar families come to this party, but they know they are overdressed. So, they clumsily mimic the host's culture.

Soon, words like feelings.

Having bones feel painfully stupid. Having a backbone feels like devolving. Like waking up in a kafkian nightmare. Hell, even using the word kafkian tastes like a nightmare.

But having hands is like having robotic implants. It’s weird, and beautiful, like falling into in a Björk videoclip. In a good way – when weird and beautiful meet and like each other and go arm in arm for a coffee, their eyes locked and the world is an amazing place.

You sit on your bed. Your body is heavy, it hangs from you. Freedom costs so much energy, so much effort… You feel sad about it, and you admire it.

A young, contented soldier walks past your window. You think of war and colors explode in your skin. The electric anger coming in bolts of drunken power; the purring delight of clean new uniforms making you at once both special and equal, above and below; the oily melancholy that drips forever in the back of your mind making you fear the silence; the deep and delicious fatty red pleasure of hunting; the long and silent silver needles of guilt; the silky gold moments of immensely precious and frail bonding; the dreadful moments of void bubbles filled only with consciousness of the absurdity of it all...

He seems not to feel any of this. The young soldier is just contented. This morning, his steps are light and happy.

Karma police, arrest this man.

The simplicity of his feelings hurt your brain. How do they do this? How do they manage to reach one state of mind, a single one, and stay there?

You wonder what that is like. Pity and envy, swirling red and white candy bittersour in the stomach.

You look at your hands again. Magichanic fingers. So precise, so beautiful. To sculpt, to crush. To write a letter, to pull a trigger.

The mashed noises get louder and you let grumpy noises out of your lungs. They seem to push the mashed noises of the world a bit away from you. You surprise yourself with the ability to throw loud sounds at the walls.

They crash and it feels so much better. Ready to leave the room.

You feel like tasting everything intelligently alive with your fingers. You are not sure why, but you feel an urge to touch people, squirrels, birds. Your hands are kept in your pocket, though, because the creatures don’t seem eager to do the same. All intelligent life here looks like they would be scared if you tried to reach them.

And that defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it?

The first taste of food is interesting. Tomatoes taste like vinegar batteries. Rice is smoothcomfort between the teeth. Butter curls into a warm nest inside your chest. Salt stings. Chocolate feels like a safe place to call home.

The second bite is always blank and disappointing.

People around are in a very different world. The taste of their food seems to be more constant. The mash of noises doesn't bother them. They don’t care if their movements are weighted down, or if their limbs hang from them towards the ground. They feel one thing at a time - for long, long time. They laugh without crying, and cry without laughing.

Here is a tip to aliens (they call foreigners 'aliens' here): beautycry is something to do either very discreetly, or to flaunt in art galleries. Also, they don’t touch or smell or taste each other here – until they eventually do, and then they drown on each other, and it's a torment of bliss and pain.

I don't see the point, but I also think it must feel amazing.

They live so long here. So, so long. Just look at them. They live so long that they spend most of their time without even remembering that they will die. I'm not kidding. It must make life much lighter – maybe that’s why they don’t mind carrying their bodies.

Maybe that’s why their happiness can breathe longer.

By the way, I must look very, very weird. Weirdweird. That weird with tiny pinches of disgust and spite, all shaken together in a muddy brown cream, in a plastic glass that is distastefully too big.

The air is cold. It feels good to be gently nudged by it, but then it hurts my fingertips and burns my lungs. Breathing cold air into by ribcage just feels stupid.

Then, it hits me. In the middle of the yard, right there. I stop and look at my fingertips.

Aha!

An octopus is trapped between my skull and my opposing thumbs today.

Of course.

We spend the day thinking of ways to communicate with each other. He plays with me, he gets bored, he stares at me for a long time. And when the night comes, we both really hope he will be able to go home tonight. We are also sad that it's the happiest thing to do, him leaving tonight.

But that is ok. Over the years, we have learned that the octopus in me will always be welcome to visit, even though we feel awkward and foreign while he is sitting in my mind’s couch.

It's fine. It is a lovingawkward. That kind that makes you smile to the floor.

Goodnight, my dear octopus. I need some sleep, now.