POP and it’s gone.
In general we conceive a ‘hole’ as being round. A circular void, the edge running evenly and precise, always maintaining a consistent distance from the centre. Whoever decided that a hole is a circle was missing something. Equality is a nice fantasy and we unjustly like to imagine it where it isn’t. Gaps are not random; matter is not equal. A hole is the shape of a wound.
The sunlight that pushes through the cracks in the shutters makes rainbows from the distortions of the glass and turns the punctures in the window from dark crevices into bright shining stars. And to land on the inside of the room, glowing muffled through the frayed curtains, and alighting with a comforting caress on the wounds that surface every material thing in this world. It is a wounded world; riddled with holes, it is.
To explain it as it happens. The popping noise as they go is nearly constant these days. And to describe the shapes of them. The shape is a problem to explain. It’s not round, it is speckled. For every one that voids out, the others around it suck in. Shiver a river, like a water-wave ripple into goosebumps. Pimpling up, swelling around damage done. Singing “loop around, part of something else now” and whistle on their way. No, they don’t do that. They disappear in an instant and the sound is simply the aftermath as matter is sucked in to replace them. It has the tat-tat-tat of popping bubble wrap. Sklooping out of there. Pop and it’s gone. The teapot tinkles along the table, jingle-jangle, spurred by the wobble of disappearing mass. Spillages slosh out and dribble down its sides. You don’t notice so much with liquid things, they fill their gaps more easily. More noticeable in the cratered sides of the china teapot and the responding cracks that arc through each time a new hole pops. The hum is made of the gentle rhythms of disappearing matter, the hammering of the rubble and dust, the perpetual shaking of everything. It is the music of the time.
We are stood in a great room. Its vaulted ceilings and high, large windows create massive emptinesses overhead and around. The air hangs above you, still but for the sun-streams, light and swirling gently with dust. The shutters are a poor attempt to keep out the dust, and the inside makes its own. There are soft drafts pushing through and stirring up patterns. Nothing in this world is sealed.
We fast forwarded on the decay button; we fiddled where we shouldn’t, playing Frankenstein with time; watching how the world may have disintegrated and reabsorbed itself in some hundreds of years, now like the piles of leaves in autumn, now in a matter of weeks. Production had ground to a halt after the realisation that an object’s lifespan shortened exponentially. The act of making became a prediction game of what would be disposed of sooner and therefore begin losing its parts as soon as it was made. The plants do ok. Economical about loss and regrowth, they seem to survive against the odds of their rapid turnover of matter. A little lost here, there, a nibble in a leaf, a hole through a branch. It incorporates the damage and grows around. She liked to look at the dandelions, opportunists that asserted themselves between the cracks in the staggered geometry of concrete dwellings. They persisted in bright yellow blotches and ragged leaves against the wind tunnel of the street. They blossom and swell, then throw out millions of hopeful white seeds that glide out on the wind and merge with the thick dusty air.
If you were to talk to the walls, what voices and complaints would reverberate in your ears, calling of aches and yearnings. To be unselved, divided from what they were. Like a plug pulled out: sloop. Pop and it’s gone. How to live in limbo, with annihilation just on the horizon line? Sometimes it’s easier to just watch the weeds grow around their wounds.