Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.
— Deleuze G., and Guattari F., A Thousand Plateaus
I remember our former bodies: the warmth radiating from our working organs, our skin coming into contact with the surroundings with its tender surface, our eyes whose fleeting glances slipped between people passing us in a hurry as the creeping darkness leaned the top of its head out from behind the orange overcast horizon and crawled cautiously, like an animal seeking warmth, between the unmoving walls of the towering buildings above us, and the chill intercepted our breaths, turning them into steam disappearing again into the depths of foreign lungs or rising upwards to find itself in another place, in another time, far from the evening melancholy of the center of the crowded city, where we first realized how much weight pinned us to the cracked surface of the old sidewalks.
I wish I could remember you differently, better, before the claws of greedy time seized you for themselves, crushing your body with a future you didn't want - from which you fled, turning your gaze toward the drifts of dirty snow lining the bus stop separating our paths - it was then that we decided to become air, to fall into the abyss of insignificance, to let the smog fill our lungs and penetrate the pores in our skin to spread the tissues, split into microscopic pieces, across a space filled with the fleeting warmth of bodies heading home; to penetrate domestic spaces and forgotten alleys, to howl along with the wind among the branches of leafless, lonely trees.
I remember; I breathed in the fragments of the world carried by the wind, but their voice was silent, although they always burst our ears with the constant hum of uninterrupted, pulsating life; voices that flew past us, detached from their owners, searching in the dark for a foothold in the membranes of others' ears snatching from the cramped, crowded space clusters of syllables reminiscent of their owners' names or phrases used by long-forgotten acquaintances, present in thoughts rolling along the wind-swept and vibrating surface of the indifferent city, which misses no one and will not pay attention to our spoken words amidst the rustling of the wind, even though we beg for its attention, knowing full well that the time to return has already passed.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Machinic Specters to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.