The room is filled with a smokey haze like congealed tobacco soap drifting in and out of caring for its own existence. I can’t see behind me and don’t want to. There might be a light. There might be a few walls. Four walls. Six. Six if it’s a cube. Is it a cube? Is it a room, for that matter? Am I just floating on a cloud of my own exhalations? What a disgusting shameful mistake that would turn out to be. Turn the cab around, you drunk son of a bitch! The big game is on. Turn the radio up. What’s the score? Mind: 3, Body: 3, Soul: nobody has yet decided if it’s even in the game. Is someone making a play? Are the cards hitting the table? Is a thin white ball piercing some spectator’s skull? How lovely, when things don’t go as planned, in a sport. Minus in a sport. That doesn’t need to be there. So why not delete it? And why are solid blocks of text so intimidating, compared to a few friendly paragraphs? It’s like having all your work laid out for you ahead of time. It’s like the grim reaper meeting you on the street corner and telling you the hour and location of your inevitable demise. It’s like a needle in your leg that you find out is part of your leg. It’s like that feeling that you have, all the time, and you hide it behind posters and plaster and shining gold jewelry and gleaming candlelight and desks and rocks and mounds of dirt and exotic trees holed up in clay pots and soon you’re running out of things to obscure your vision so you grab anything and everything as you run as fast as you can forgetting you’re on a treadmill. What feeling? Does it really need to be explained? Of course not, but that’s not the point, because I need something to throw in front of it too and adjectives work just as well as objects if you know how to use them properly. There’s a hole in the midst of your ocean and you don’t know how it got there. Water is pouring into it at an alarming rate and you want as much water as you can but it leaves faster than you can count it. The hole might be growing, you can’t be sure. But the point is it needs to be patched up. So you build. Through the nerve tendons in your brain stream thousands of little blue synapses, a colony of ethereal ants crawling back and forth, tiptoeing lightly on the flowing surface of the ocean like messiahs and miracle working beast-fighters. They scavenge the depths of the seas and the heights of the skies for twigs and stones and mud and sand and they paste it together with their glowing saliva, making bridges across the widening hole in the ocean, trying to seal the gap that may or may not be there at all because every one of the ants is covered in eyes but every eye is blind either because it cannot receive light or there is not light to receive. So they struggle on and extend their crumbling structures over miles of void searching for a friend to meet them in the middle but how often do their structures swing astray and bring them back to the same patch of ocean where they once were before but this time much farther down, because building on water that is moving downwards, as quickly and frantically as they may be able to do, is a risky business and will generally end up with not only a blatant lack of architectural foundation but also a significant decrease in elevation as time swirls on. So when the structures get too far down the ants working on them are lost to the howling darkness along with gallons and gallons of water every fraction of a second. Until you’re not just losing water anymore. You’re losing your memories, that were strapped in little heaps of rotting vegetable matter to the backs of the little blue insects as they fell to their timely doom. Their cobwebs continue to stretch themselves across the mighty expanse, but seldom do they meet the other side and when they do it only causes more destruction. So you’re not done yet. No, you can’t give up. You’ve already tried to give up and discovered you cannot. So you think, letting the creatures scurry around inside you from one side of the ocean to the next, to all ends of the compass and all curves of the world inside you until you know what to try next and you don’t want to try it but what choice do you have? You realize that you can’t build on the water. It’s moving too fast and it’s water. You have to dive. So down the little monsters go. The ants begin diving. They let the tides pull them near to the hole and then they slip beneath the waves and wriggle their spindly legs trying to find purchase in a liquid medium they were never meant for. And they find it, but not before most of them are drowned and floating up again and being sucked into the hole. But some of them keep going. They move downwards, ever downwards, and if they could see then they would notice how dark it all is, that deep under the water, despite the fact that it remains to be determined if it were just as dark on the surface of the ocean. But they can’t think about that. No, they can’t think at all. All they do is follow your commands like good and noble soldiers, young and foolish, in the care of a commanding officer even younger. They plunge ever downward, their blue carapaces saturated in the pressure of the deep, searching for a rocky bottom, so that it might be discovered, at long last, where the hole is, what the hole is in, what precisely the hole is a lack of, because this can only be done if the medium through which the hole is a puncture is identified. But if the glowing electric-blue snowdrops crawling deeper in the waters never hit bottom, how can they patch the hole? If there is no bottom to be found, how can there be a hole at all? Or rather, how can there be an ocean? Because if there is no bottom, then all is a hole. But if all is a hole then why does the ocean collapse in one specific locale? Questions swim in your mind as the ants drown. Their brine-inflated corpses are carried away past the event horizon and you can no longer command them, and the packs on their strong little backs holding miniscule percentiles of your character and your memories and your sanity are once again lost along with the bearers. You want to cry for them but you know they are just insects, and crying for each one would take years that you do not have nor desire to have, so you let them die and try to keep smiling. It’s the little ones that get you. When one is lost at a time. A fleet of insects is a terrible thing to see gone, but it becomes an event and a life altering experience and as such it can brooded on applied and then brushed aside. But the death of a single insect is something to be cherished, something over which one’s heart begins to feel the strain of its many restless beats catching up to it, something that makes the lungs breathe cold and the stomach twist and the eyes curl up and spit out their sides and the legs begin to buckle and gravity the almighty banker begin to collect its long awaited interest. So keep sending them and keep spiraling farther in your thoughts and around your ears looking for the source of the hole or the location of the hole or building boats to sail away on or lighthouses that just spew more slimy darkness into the hypothetical fog that surrounds your kingdom. Feel as the creatures burrow and twist in new ways, leaving behind fungus and cumulonimbus and broken chunks of pink squash that smell after two or three weeks. You command them as they tunnel and as they search and as they scratch and bore through the piles of unread literature making their way in an orderly procession to soil and earthy grass-fodder, but the one thing you can never never never command them to do is stop.