my writing

!heavy content warning!

MANDELBROT 03/24
On behalf of the void: When Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia began to investigate the field of mathematical complex dynamics in the beginning of the twentieth century,
and when Peigen and Richter unleashed the Mandelbrot set on the new world of personal computers,
they buzzed with life and crashed when you dared to zoom in on the intangible fractal.
SEAHORSE VALLEY:
What to do when gold is pyrite
and websites are not found.
DOUBLE SPIRALS:
Not quite parallel, crashing at a point even when they do all they can to avoid it,
SEAHORSE:
twenty-five spokes and twelve spokes and one spoke,
and you won’t speak, not even when the doors of the brick-and-mortar block-corner tech store close and there’s no one to idly chat with about music and math while the cold breeze blows past the mildly cracked glass doors that the manager won’t fix because “no one has broken in yet”.
And when your computer bluescreens, remember it could have been you
behind the counter.
Next, the MISIUREWICZ POINT:
A pre-periodic critical point. Non-recurrent, just like
a second, like a year.
A complex quadratic polynomial only has a singular critical point. We reach this point at the end of a SEAHORSE’S TAIL:
And when we spoke for the first time, we mumbled about the Mandelbrot set, you in the flash drive aisle and I shelving GPUs. And when we spoke for the last time,
you were knocking on the store’s front door and the manager told me to not let you in because we were closed so when he left I opened the door to you and your ragged green jacket with tacky rock band patches and the chilly city air and I knew that the world was going to keep me away from you.
And it did,
SATELLITE:
You didn’t know this part (it’s fairly new research)
I told you the definition I regurgitated from a pretentious, hardcover Guide to Fractals that I manipulated an ex who worked at a bookstore to special order for me. But there is a different SATELLITE out there as well, the ones in space I knew, watching us, and loving us with cold mechanical hearts and unfathomably precise eyes. And I knew that the SATELLITES were watching us at that moment.
The Mandelbrot set is
“a simply connected set, which means there are no islands and no loop roads around a hole”,
and, let’s just say we were navigating its infinity, weaving through the aisles of the store I worked at, but there’s no way to cross it, you at the X and I at the Y.
And a SATELLITE makes a crown, from the antennae to the Christian-repelling prayer-inducing Biblically accurate concentric middle. And nature was God to you, and math was God to me. So yes, the SATELLITES are watching.

SAND FOR DINNER
It’s easy to understand: the gravel beneath my feet are the shredded remains of a child I never could be. When we looked around curiously, you noticed the holographics of the water, the sky, and far more interestingly, the green-and-red abandoned towel. It’s a reminder— you’re a reminder— that we’re never going to be able to bury a slightly smaller version of ourselves, alone, in that gritty sand. This awful thunder, and the nearshore burrow that used to be so beautiful in the sun. You looked at me and told me that this dark cloudy beach is the reason why you don’t call me down for dinner anymore. It took me a minute (my legs stopped swinging back and forth in the cold water, my fingers ceased their incessant tapping on the sand), but as the inky waves soaked my jeans, I wanted to tell you that despite all that, I still eat dinner. I couldn’t say that, so I said what I knew: that the lotus root in the fridge didn’t ask to be unceremoniously discarded. I’m sorry for getting the expired ones from Lotte. I can still see the roots lying on that towel, all separated and rotting. After that, the waves submerged me to my chin, and I saw it, I saw everything— the dinner that I cooked a couple weeks ago, the wings of clouds, and my eyes in the rocks.

CONCRETE AND STEEL RAIL
The fluorescent lights of the subway glaze my eyes over with their oily blue sheen; I've passed the threshold and all I am is awake. I love to be with the concrete, the rain-soaked high-rise buildings that drip, drip, drip, until all you can see is the fog in their irises and the distant blue lights of an apartment who's awake, too. If I look up, there is sky, and then there is concrete. There is always concrete: methodical blocks and things far too heavy to lift up– and the stony voice crackles from the speakers, a layer of dust rejoicing in its last swirl through the air as I step off the train, into a land without movement.

velvet parabolas
"I'm more into the dead sea romance— swirly graphs of anabiosis, salty depths of nothingness and coming full circle," I used to say, waving my open hand in circles to explain. "And, if I were to choose, romance would be like the cascading sheets of rain; gravel crunching on the ground and subsuming itself into oblivion." But then the change— no longer do the particles of salt stay solidified at the bottom— came along, and I am washed anew, as the ground destroys the abstract at face value. And no longer can I stay floating away from what's real, and what's real tends to flower and scale the towers of my guarded eyes. When I open my eyes I see in technicolor, I see beauty and love, small thoughts that I store in my favorite cabinets, just to look at and feel, all the time.

DROWN
Drown it out: I left her shiny teeth that clacked against mine, the stems of roses back from his plant-growing obsession, and the letter I wrote for both of them, far beneath my bed. My hands stay wrapped around your head, carding strands through my fingers. Violence is the taste we give each other, above your eyelashes, and under my chin. Untangling the soft halo from your hair, I'm blinded - as if you're the seraph and I the travesty. When I told you, you laughed quietly as we hid in the back of a mall bathroom: The irony of the predicament. As if any of us could still claim a shred of holiness.

amalgam (20)
See through these irises, now, watch the wilt of my winter jackets as they flatten against the back of the navy plastic seats, keys make the same sound, they always make the same sound. I might be dreaming, but I can see the metal bees whirring in motion, from place to place,
motion and macroscopic objects,
indiscernibility,
Inconspicuous as I felt like I was. And as conspicuous as I remembered.

400 DAYS
HOUR 1
I’m ruined against the rotting arch. The two of them are discussing some irrelevant, dead issue, but all I can see are the technicolor lights.
Years back, we had cassette tapes of an idea, ripped up walls with aging masking tape that no one could peel off, his backpack ringing with the heavy keychains of cartoon characters, her cut-out figures, and the chessboard I always brought. It wasn’t much of a chessboard, really: I colored in so many squares, I used it without the pieces too many times, I’d abandon a pawn painted in neon on broken glass to mark my territory.
They usually call this point “losing your mind”, but that already happened, far before we became one pantheon. It happened, probably, when I left the eighth pawn on the doorstep of my grandma’s brownstone as a little farewell, or maybe when we stumbled upon a metal arm with all the flesh still inside.
It was laid on my chessboard— the pink square, but it was red when we got there.

DAY 40
Forty days is nine hundred sixty hours. I read in an old book that prisoners keep track of time to stay sane, but I’m not a prisoner at all, here with them. I used to love the feel of rot, the moss, the shredded paper. It felt so human, but we’re nothing more than talismans (the diminished symbol). The years— days? Water me down, just like when you carve a smooth pawn’s head into a sharp tool, it scratches, it scratches and bleeds.
I love them (the ones here with me), if I think a bit harder, I’ll tell you their names. But we don’t need to think because we love, instead.

DAY 400
I made a pawn out of stone and carved all of our initials into the arch. It was easy enough, see, he made the arch so malleable, the moss curving around my fingers and the dirt falling through my hands. I dug until I found the roll of tape, I showed it to her and she smiled, saying—
“I used to glue strips of tape to the wall so you two would stay longer trying to peel them off.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t funny—
“I tried to take the tape off even when the walls had burnt and there was only brownstone left.”
And only I was left, so I said,
“See, I built the arch out of the shards that didn’t burn.”
Then I could see the shadows of burnt tape, so I put the moss back.

MY HUSBAND AND I TRAVEL
down the dirt road. California-born workers, we are.
I don’t visualize: there is a railroad, and there is
my husband.
Who are they to say that I am unfathomable?
The year is eighteen-twenty-two. I learned to count from my mother, who came from
a place called Canton
(and I say it like can-town, like they did in the brownstone, where I stayed; where are you from?)
and I learned my work through my father, who came from
a place called Carolina
and I learned to run because of my husband, and because I am a broken woman,
and because I do not have a definitive answer when asked to explain my hazel-dark eyes.
I hold my husband’s hand like
a grudge, perform like the Oriental dancers we saw back home,
wait for a resolve and fall into the dirt again.
It’s gravel, after all,
and it’s ivy, ivy like a name.
(While I would name an ivy bush, my husband would name a seashell.)
I talk like a Californian, and pronounce my own name wrong, and say CAR-olina, because it’s wrong.
He asked me when we met: do you dance?
(And I don’t, of course I don’t, who would teach me?)
But I told him I do, like a woman from Canton with bound feet and broken bones but still leap and twirl for their husbands.
So when we dance,
we dance,
and I know he is excited by the prospect of the Orient (even though it is
just half, and not much at that)
I tiptoe down the rail as my husband sleeps next to it, knowing there is no train, and there will be no train,
and he likes to pretend we’re young, and I like to pretend we’re old,
this way, he can pretend I am an agile woman from Canton,
and I can pretend I’ve retired for the night.