a theory in pieces

Dearest,

Slip me a part of your heart and I will slip you a fraction of mine. Let us take a slice of each other then adjust ourselves, fastening these new pieces inside. ‘Thump thump thump.’ What’s that? The beat sounds different now. And, of course, it is.

If we could dance, we would. Fragment to fragment; face to face. Take me to an empty lot and sway with me. We will feel funny things in our chests and blame it on the newness. We are sensing the takeover. We have begun.

To look closely upon one another. When we stop dancing, we will come to see we are like neighbours peering in on each other’s lives. If we could trade places, we would know that our difference is mostly a matter of angles.

But try as we might, we cannot get behind the window of each other’s perception. And so we pretend we are two of the same, and forget to think that two creatures in time are merely compatible aliens.

We assume we are rational beings; we mistake what we see for what is. You can only see from your inside and I from mine. I am swimming through the waves of my sight to reach you. But I am stuck inside. Inside looking out.

Imagine a mobile of many perceptions and call it a world. What do we see, all at the same time turning? I have made my version and you have made yours. The collective moment is also unique. It is simply a matter of spinning.

Beyond subjectivity is the thing. The thing we are all differently grasping through our filters of laws and theories. We cling to our teddy bears of understanding, tossing and turning. We are getting dizzy.

When we spin in our dance, what are our respective experiences? And what are we when divorced? The earth is quaking. Where is our ground now? The space between our perceptive distances is the place we meet.

If we have exchanged the pieces I think we have, and have fastened them into our hearts, can we extend to the space between us and call it ‘love’? Can the space become a land we make our own? Will we colonize it in passion’s name?

I am living with the fragment you have given me and call it ‘you’. How can a fragment look so whole? You are a uniform body and yet this metaphor I call ‘a piece of something greater’ remains.

When you realize the alien factor and cry because you can only know me in parts, remember that it feels better to eat a piece of the pie than to eat it all. Perhaps everything is like a pie. Sweet in slices. Sickening as a whole.