the size of "just a moment"
i want to tell you a story, just to get it out –
it’s started following me around like a lost dog – i don’t know how it came to me or where it came from.
one day i was thinking of thinking of a story and then there it was.
it doesn’t have any tags or a microchip.
can stories have rabies? worms?
it’s started following me around to all the places i go. it sits across from me at coffee shops – i order two cups now.
it sits under my desk at work and growls at customers. i tell them “he’s really a good story. sometimes he’s just grumpy.”
some days i ride my bike to some far away place and find it sitting there waiting for me, smoking a cigarette all nonchalant, like its not a big deal that its there, like its not a big deal for a story to follow a boy around like a lost dog and then smoke a nonchalant cigarette at him.
since it first began following me, it’s gotten bigger and bigger – not really bigger in number of words or even content, just larger, heavier. it’s funny how i promised to do a story for this zine about changing size, then when i procrastinated my story started changing size like this.
as a kind of experiment i was tempted to wait it out just to see how big and heavy my story would get. it’s a strange experience, to be followed by a story and then watch it change size at you. but it weighs on me. sometimes it jumps on my back and it almost crushes me and i try to get it off i try to knock it off but i can’t get it off because it’s just a figment of my imagination. but it’s there, getting bigger and heavier and it says “why don’t you just tell me already and i’ll leave you alone?”
“i found you so now you have to tell me. that’s how this works. didn’t you promise someone a story for a zine or something. hasn’t it been a few months since you promised i’d be ready for them? what are you doing any way? you asshole! aren’t they all waiting for you? i’ll only get heavier and bigger the longer you wait, so tell me there. then i’ll leave."
"okay” i say “i’ll tell you.”
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very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very veryverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy distant future.
i’ve actually lost track of the years from now, what we call the present –but wait… what we called the present that’s a future to people in what we call the past so i’ll stop calling this the future because that’s stupid just forget i said that ok?
ok, so things have changed a lot in the uncountable years between then and now.
don’t even ask me which is which. that would just be mean at this point.
there are a lot less people for one thing. in the so-called city i live there are only 532 residents total. you live there too.
we live around a tower that juts from the world like a splinter or a haggard finger pointing to the sky. i’ll tell you more about that later.
besides that one strange omen dressed up as a building the city is very beautiful. there are wildflowers the size of your head growing everywhere. the buildings are small mostly and covered in vibrant paintings of animals and cars and other old technologies that only exist in now ancient stories.
most mornings fog rolls down the mountains like an avalanche of clouds, but instead of horrible desolation and destruction it leaves dewey wet everything and a generally refreshing feeling in it’s wake.
even the crooked finger tower is covered in flowers and paintings and little palm trees no bigger than a person – the size of a person… that brings me to the next thing that’s different here… now… whatever.
by the size of a person i mean the size of a person when they’re normal sized.
it’s important to make that distinction because there is a disease of sorts that afflicts most everyone, a kind-of-pandemic, where people grow to tremendous sizes. it affects you in cycles, causing you to grow so large for only so long and then back to normal.
i am starting changing size now, on my way to see you. i am growing and growing going out past the city limits, past the tiny little roads and tiny little cars and tiny little houses filled with tiny little people filled with tiny little problems and tiny little joys. they once seemed so large. they were everything. now distance and size are shrinking them to dim little shapes and i’m heading to fill the vast empty space beyond the city limits. the wastes past the city are like pages someone wrote a long, detailed story on, then nervously erased.
the tower in the center of the city is sending out a force field that is pushing me out out as i grow. if we stayed we would be too large, too large for the life we have in the city.
the tower was built a long time ago by some very intelligent people everyone eventually forgot. that was when this changing size first started, when people knew what it was, and when they knew how to do something about it. maybe they could have found a cure. but they became us and we became our changing size and the cycles we live in. and so it goes.
i’m at the end of the city now where the destroyed page begins and i see you coming. i am still almost regular sized. you are still the biggest thing for miles. this is how we always meet. between cycles: i see you coming back every time i go out. i see you coming out every time i go back. we always meet between, alone and between.
we are always in these growing and shrinking cycles and we will never be the same size at the same time for more than a moment and we can never stop for even o n e s e c o n d.
some people lose this ability or disease or whatever fairly quickly. they grow and shrink and grow and shrink for a while then stop. they find a size they’re comfortable with and then can start working on filling the rest of their lives with other things of a certain size.
i doubt you and me will ever be completely comfortable.
i love the macro-universe sized moments, by myself drifting through endless planet sized deserts. and i love the small moments, i can fit in a chair, in a cup of coffee, in a tiny morning with the sun shrinking behind blue municipal clouds.
every time we return here back from and on our way to the most beautiful things we have ever seen, alone:
purple carburetor canyons,
menthol ashy cliffs on the moon,
blackest sea, blackest space,
“it’s so cold out there.”
and we only meet between them. this is what we have. brief moments, with stories of the whole rest of our lives surrounding them.
and the city is so perfect and beautiful, filled with all the people we love. i don’t know – could i say goodbye to them forever? and “hello, Everything Else”?
sometimes we talk about what it’d be like if we kept growing forever.
i remember when we first realized we were getting bigger and bigger every cycle.
i was waiting for you a lot like i am now. you walked up to me with a secret smile, pulled clenched fists out of your pockets and dropped moon rocks into my hands.
if we kept growing forever would we die?
how long can you hold your breath in space?
or do you think our gravity would become too much and then we’d pull in everything – the universe is supposed to be expanding forever because gravity is weaker than the velocity everything is moving at – would we tip those scales and start a great crunch?
some people we know in the city believe that our changing size is because an increasingly lonely always expanding universe is asking us to come closer come closer and fill it’s empty spaces with cars and houses and babies and grocery stores and bakeries and parks and the heat and noise we make. then one day it will all become too much and the universe will collapse back into itself.
god will put his toys away.
but that’s not were this story is going. that’s an aside for no one: a consolation prize for the unconsolable.
it’s hard to care right now about any of that. it’s like the questions i ask myself. like, if it wasn’t for this changing size would i know you, would i love you, would you love me like you do and don’t? question marks look a lot like cul-de-sacs when i ask those questions. the thing that brought us together is the thing that will keep us apart.
but i don’t care. you’re here now and i’m scaling your foot – it’s a steep cliff, your torso: foothills and mountains and a sloping valley. i know this terrain. i’m walking through the geography of you, peaks, valleys, hidden places, swimming through a torrent of hair or is it like a jungle dense and dark for me to tumble through?
i know you like you are my homeland. there are well-treaded paths and there’s hidden clearings with light i haven’t ever seen poking it’s head through the trees waiting to meet me.
you’re shrinking now. i’m growing now. for just a moment we’ll be the same size.
this is the biggest moment i have ever known.
moments can have different sizes and this one is huge.
if you take your life and count up the seconds you spend doing everything you do, you’ll find most of your life is made up of the most mundane things: the sleeping, the working, the things you do every day over and over without even thinking about it. but that’s not your life.
those moments are small, microscopic to memory. they hold nothing. they just keep you alive.
you live, really live inside the moments you turn over and over in your head.
even though it’s just a moment, it is massive to me and takes up most of my brain’s time.
so that is what i have: the weight and size of a series of moments, and a homeland in you, and all these things i’ll see as i grow endlessly to bring back.
all these things i can only reach alone. but i’ll bring them back for you to see:
rings of saturn around my fingers,
maps of distant moons on my face,
alpha centauri on my lapel.
space is mostly an empty dusty hallway.
and some dust falls into beautiful constellations.
bodies orbiting each other are taking the fastest path to each other in a curved space.
comets that fly by in the night will fly by in the night again. one day the moon will return to the earth and it will say “welcome back old friend. come on in. i made you some coffee and tea. i saw you flying around up there. looked fun. have a seat and tell me about it.”
now with this changing size we are a part of the universe like comets and stars are and gaseous clouds of burning violet are, like cosmic neon diner signs.
you hitch a ride with the sun.
i’ll hitch a ride on the moon.
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there’s a lot in there i don’t remember seeing in there when it was following me around. some things just kind of happened, i don’t know if i believe them fully. they’re just comforting thoughts that fell out of my head when my brain was chewing on saddest thoughts bubblegum.
i’m not going to try to hide the obvious.
i couldn’t if i wanted to anyway.
my brain’s always been a glass house, but the glass is a little warped: fun-house glass i guess.
last night i had a dream i pressed a button that would restart the universe.
it’s a sunny, almost-perfect, tiny morning now and i can put this moment in my coffee, and drink it bitter-sweet.
so here’s to wishful thinking:
tangentwithtanner
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
blakekathryn
titsay
kaledo-art
