Unbecoming
All the words in the world don’t explain laughter or tears. I am not a fine observer but wearing the skin of a lens and gripped by what is before me. It appears magnified as if closed in upon when this is the world and its counterparts, its precursors and unimaginable others spreading out across a plain that runs from vision. Indeed, any sense. Try feeling the contours of the names we give to ambition or betrayal, to obedience and devotion. On your tongue they are as if the body; in the air they stretch to unbecoming. But nonexistence dressed. And this is all we say, that moving from not knowing ourselves to the story, we wrap what can never be full or empty, what is neither here nor there, what has no level, in content. The gift is on the outside. This is not to say that life as flesh and breath is a matter of style and that living it in a certain way, substance, but maybe that words measure for us the measure of us and as well the distance from everything to nothing by taking as their mark something in between.
—MTC Cronin