Somewhere, in Philadelphia, there lives an unread emotion. As a writer, you either find it, or imagine it so hard that you nearly burst a blood vessel, in which case a narrative is born. It’s a birth unsightly; it is marker on mahogany, and the sweat that passes a singer’s ear as they recite lyrics, stacked neatly on tempos we count by way of our own heart beats, but never out loud. 

In this case, what are we enumerating, when we arrive? Does time stutter in the wake of our own personal interval? When they first amalgamated the theory to suffering, to exclusion, to complete futility, they avoided the way a human body can endure electric pains beyond the stacked sense of an abacus spine, beyond a threat to one-hundred and seventy-three other glass bones, and beyond the plain tally of a woven scar. Emotion, non-quantum and everywhere at once, is the first thing to leave us as we retire from non-existence, spitting and crying for life, and the last thing to leave, too, when from the greatest womb we ultimately retire. Zero, and infinity. The marker runs out, someday, never. Who’s counting? 

God—whatever this is to you—is a writer, whose biography for us fluctuates between an ode and an obituary, without changing tone, without skipping a beat. Mathematicians, I am afraid, have no place in the Holy Land, much less under our ribs, or between beams of stage lighting. Here, we are all the unread emotions of a universe with no music, no bathroom stall.